


The Road Not Taken

by SherlockMalfoy



Category: Heroes (TV), Heroes Reborn (TV)
Genre: Aftermath of Violence, Angst, Blood, Blood and Gore, Consequences of Time Travel, Dark Peter, M/M, Murder, Time Travel, Violent Thoughts, many powers, redemption sort of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-26
Updated: 2019-09-26
Packaged: 2020-10-28 12:14:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 32,029
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20778395
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SherlockMalfoy/pseuds/SherlockMalfoy
Summary: In a multitude of realities and timelines, many things are the same. Many things are different. In this one, through a quirk of fate it wasn't Hiro Nakamura that raised little Nathan Bennet to be a hero... it was Peter Petrelli and Gabriel Gray.Well... they tried. In their own way.(Rating is because of certain thematic elements, but not graphic sex. Just an FYI.)





	The Road Not Taken

**Author's Note:**

> The timeline for Heroes is screwy to begin with. At the end of the fic, I've included an explanation for the timeline of this fic for the readers to hopefully help the passage of time here make a bit of sense in regards to Seasons 1-4.
> 
> Additionally, this entire story was written stream of consciousness over the course of 5-ish days and nights, so there may still be errors. Also, tags may be added or adjusted as I see fit.
> 
> The switching between present and past tenses A LOT is intentional and will not be changed.

It had started with a simple text message to Peter's phone but meant for Sylar.

A message that, if someone were to ask the men twenty years from that moment, both would say that it changed the course of the events that were still yet to come. For good or ill, it depended on who you asked and when. For them, from their perspective this is certainly true. But in reality…. Well… that could wait for later. But the message that was given to them was viewed as a godsend.

For Sylar it meant freedom for the first time in years. For Peter it meant that perhaps, if Sylar really tried, Peter's life could resemble something close to normal again.

Another text hours later as dawn was approaching meant that they were all still safe. For how long, one could never truly know. But the secret Claire had so selfishly exposed to the world was once again swept under the rug.

Peter called in to work to swap shifts with someone else so he would work a double and have the day to rest. He fell asleep to the familiar snores of Sylar in the next room. It gave him something to focus on so he could block out the noises of the city and it's pulsing heartbeat and all that LIFE around him so suddenly after five years of silence save for the man on his couch.

Sylar left after a few days saying he needed some time to adjust. Time to think. Days became weeks, but Peter got a phone call every so often. Just Sylar checking in. Letting him know he hasn't slipped up.

Sylar showed up on February 7th, two months since the Carnival. He had a pizza and wore something other than black. He had glasses and had cleaned up pretty well. Given how often Peter had avoided him in their private nightmare world, it was easy for the two men to fall into the familiar pattern of speaking and acting as if they'd just seen one another the day before.

"I've got an apartment now. Not exactly in a decent part of town but they didn't ask too many questions. It's small, but cozy."

"That's good. Though... I'm pretty sure if they ran your social or your name..."

"Rebel owed me one. New name. New identity. A clean slate."

"I thought he cleared your name. Purged your records."

Sylar shrugs. "It was kind of him to do that for me but... that's not who I am anymore."

"So who are you then?"

"Not Sylar," he replies, reaching for another slice of pizza instead of summoning it to himself with telekinesis. "But not Gabriel Gray either. Something... Someone between the two."

Conversation meanders naturally around to other topics. Other stories. At the end of the night, Peter falls asleep to the familiar snores and for the first time since Sylar - no, Gabriel - no. That's not quite right either...

For the first time since Gabe wandered off, Peter sleeps comfortably through the night.

Claire comes calling in March.

One of Peter's few coffee cups is broken against a wall near the mantle where a framed photo of Peter and Nathan as children sits - replacing one of the two men from Nathan's wedding. The photo falls to the floor, the glass breaking over Nathan's smiling and dirt smudged face, when she slams the door behind her in a rage.

Almost as if he knew what had happened, Gabe shows up that night two hours before Peter has to leave for work with pizza and a bottle of some off brand pop.

Peter doesn't mention that the pop was the same brand from the nightmare world. The same brand they used to toast in the new year behind the wall since all of the wine and champagne Gabe had drunk in his life was utter shit so all of the wine and champagne they could find was utter shit, too.

The pizza, at least, is different. It had pineapple and ham, even though Gabe hates it. He still eats it. Because it's one of Peter's favorites.

They don't talk about what happened with Claire that day. Instead, Peter listens and lets him talk.

Gabe's decided to take classes at one of the technical schools. He wouldn't need to. All he needs to do is read a book on a subject and his ability does the rest. It's the practical aspect he's looking forward to. "To keep my hands busy. Clocks... watches.... timepieces remind me too much of what I used to be. I think I might become a mechanic. You know I never mind getting my hands dirty. I've always really liked to dig into what I'm working on."

Neither man mentions that it was always blood that dirtied his skilled hands. Nor do they mention that it was human brains, and with surgical precision, that he liked to dig those expert fingers into and work on.

"It'll be good for me to refocus on something else. Something productive... where I can help people. Do you think it's a good idea, Peter?"

And Peter nods and agrees with him because honestly, it's better than Peter could come up with in a lot of ways. And it wouldn't require the EMT to follow him around in his free time just to make sure he doesn't become a serial killer. Again.

He packs some of the left-over pizza and takes it to work with him before walking Gabe out and locking the door behind them. It's such an odd habit to him to lock his door again. A mere strange respect for his privacy won't keep the outside world from barging into his home like it had Gabe for so long.

The next time Gabe shows up with pizza and pop a week later, Peter gives him a key to his apartment.

Peter doesn't mention that he and Emma broke up that day. They're still friends - at least he thinks so. He's more concerned with why he's not upset about it than anything else.

But Gabe, as always, seems to know what's bothering him and deftly avoids the subject of relationships. Not that it's anything he really talks about anyway. But Peter appreciates the gesture. Instead, Gabe tells him about the certification program he found and enrolled himself in.

When Gabe gets up to leave, Peter throws a blanket at him.

Gabe doesn't tell him how grateful he is for the silent invitation to stay. The only good nights of sleep he gets are at Peter's place. The city doesn't seem so loud. It doesn't press in on him so much when he's around the Italian Eagle Scout.

Gabe makes breakfast before Peter gets up the next morning, and fixes the man's coffee just the way he likes it. Like he did nearly every morning starting in their third year behind the wall together. The silence between them as they eat is comfortable and warm. When they're finished they move with such practiced ease and familiarity one might mistake them as closer than ex-mortal enemies and tentative acquaintances.

But no one could see them there. So there was no one to think such things.

It was April First when Peter's world was turned upside down for the first time since December 7th.

It was a normal shift all things considered.

And then a patient died enroute to the hospital. He did everything he could. Hesam sped through the streets of New York as fast as traffic and the flashing lights and siren would allow until the old woman grasped Peter's arm tightly and screamed in pain before passing out. Peter was so worked up and focused he hadn't noticed the power transfer that took place in her dying moments. He did not feel the strangeness of old senses and dormant abilities waking up as if from a very long sleep. No, he noticed none of this as he worked to try and bring this old woman back from death. And after ten minutes of tireless work... he was forced to give up and call the time of death.

The siren went off. The lights were cut. Jane Doe was DOA.

As Peter stood in the ER at a nurse's station filling out his paperwork on the now deceased patient, he wiped his nose with the back of his hand. Then again. He frowned when a splotch of red dripped onto the paper next to his statement.

"Janine?" he managed to get out, gaining the attention of the nurse in front of him. "I don't feel so well..."

The world spun. His nose was bleeding. Everything was so sharp and blurred at the same time. His head was pounding and his arms felt like jelly. Peter collapsed there by the nurse's station.

"You could have picked a better day to try and die than April Fools you idiot."

The voice was unfamiliar, and so was the face. But the text book open in the young man's lap was not. "Gabe?"

"Who else is going to be sitting here reading about how to properly rebuild a carburetor at your bedside? Angela? Claire?"

"Tell me they didn't see you."

"Well I certainly wasn't going to let them run me off, now was I?"

"Did you always look like that?"

"It's my... public face, Peter. Some people still remember when my real face was plastered all over the television for killing my mother."

"So you have two different photo IDs with the same name."

"Yes."

Peter just shakes his head and sighs. "I hope you weren't too hard on them when they were here."

Gabe grins. "I was a perfect gentleman. And, as a matter of fact, your niece rather likes Ian and thinks he'll be a very good influence on you." Gabe plays it up for laughs a little longer before Peter asks him if he knows anything about what happened to him.

"The doctor says exhaustion, stress, dehydration and pneumonia."

"You don't sound convinced."

Gabe looks back down at his book and pretends to read. "Of course not. You showed the same symptoms once before. After you saved the cheerleader." His words are low, but Peter still hears him. And it's a reminder that no matter how much Gabe has actually changed and legitimately feels remorse and has repented for what he had done in his past, he still carried around the memories of a dead man. A man he murdered and was then forced to become for a time. A man Peter had loved more than any other - more than his own mother even.

"I think... I think you should go. I'm not feeling up for visitors right now."

And so Gabe closes his book and puts it into his bag. "Peter-"

"Come back tomorrow. You've... got class right? Come by after that."

Relief flickers across the unfamiliar eyes and he gives a hesitant nod before he gets up and leaves without another word. Peter turns to his side as much as the IV will allow and reminds himself that there was nothing he could do. The past is the past, and that is where it needed to stay. He had found the man in the monster, and he was determined to make sure that together, they kept the monster at bay.

When Gabe's unfamiliar face returns the next day, Claire is sitting there with Peter. Smiling and laughing and telling him about something else her girlfriend has done. Their fight from before seemingly forgotten.

"They're releasing me tomorrow. Claire has to get back to DC and mom's got a meeting in California. Doc thinks I shouldn't be alone for another day or two."

"You want me to stay over and nurse you back to health?"

"Someone's got to. I can't exactly do it myself now can I?"

The following day, "Ian" helps Peter into a cab, then up the stairs to his apartment in Manhattan. That night, after Gabe's cleared away their dinner and finished the dishes, he settles down on the sofa with a book. The book, however, is yanked out of his grasp. "Peter!"

But Peter was standing across the room, now floating the book and turning the pages without even touching them. "I think you were right. The last time I got this sick was when I absorbed telekinesis from you and regen from Claire around the same time."

They spend the next three days testing out what all Peter can do. At first they think he's just copying powers from Gabe... until Peter's hands briefly turn invisible without him really noticing.

"I think..." Gabe said after the three days of testing. "I think that you have all of your powers back.. from before Arthur..."

"I think so, too."

Neither one voices their concern about what it means.

Neither one wants to face the reality that Peter once again will feel the Hunger that Gabe himself struggles with every single day.

It's not until the end of May when Gabe gets a frantic phone call from Peter after his class is done for the day.

"Don't ask questions. Just come to my apartment. Now."

"I'm on my way."

When he gets to Peter's, the man is a nervous wreck. There's completed jigsaw puzzles on every surface. Books on all manner of things open as if he were merely perusing their contents instead of trying to read all of them at once. The predatory instinct that Gabe had been struggling to keep at bay flared to life as he took in what he had found, piecing all of the evidence together as easily as if he were checking the time.

"I don't know- I don't know how much longer I can-"

Gabe stopped him after assessing the situation. "Hit me."

"What? No!"

"Peter, I said hit me. As hard as you can. Do it!"

"I'm not going to hit you!"

"Trust me. free shot. Right in the face."

When Peter doesn't comply, Gabe does something he already regrets even as he does it. He changes his appearance into Nathan Petrelli. Peter's eyes widen and his pupils dilate with rage. A fist smashes into Gabe's face and forces him to change back. Peter is snarling, pounding into his friend and feeling the bones break only for them to repair themselves moments later.

By the time Peter's got it worked out of his system, Gabe's a bloody mess and hates himself for instigating it. But it was necessary. "Feel better?"

"What the hell! What the hell!"

"The Hunger, Peter..." Gabe says quietly in the silence that follows. "If you can't manage it, it will consume you. You were already too far gone to redirect it like I do. You need more than books and jigsaw puzzles. A change in career might be a good idea. Something that will keep your hands and your mind busy. Maybe learn a new skill, like I did."

Gabe starts coming around more often after this. He brings some of his homework with him and lays out old newspaper on the dining table, or on the coffee table so he doesn't get any oil or grease on Peter's furniture.

It's not until Peter loses another patient in the ambulance that he loses his cool again. Until he has to call Gabe in the middle of the night. It's the tremor in his voice that hooks him. But it's the underlying desire - dark and menacing - that has him getting dressed and racing across New York in the dead of night.

The lights are off when he slips in, not bothering with the spare key because it would take too long and every second counts. When he closes the door he feels an invisible hand on his neck, squeezing and squeezing. "What the hell did you do to me?" is snarled out of the dark.

Gabe pushes back with his own power. Forcing through sheer will the invisible hand on his throat to release him and strikes back in kind. "You went to the future and you chose to seek out some other future me. YOU did this to yourself, not me."

"Damn you Sylar!"

The old name stings when heard in that voice. But he knows... oh he knows that Peter isn't himself right now. He's a slave to the desire to know more. Find more. Get more. The need to understand why how when what and everything and it breaks Gabe's heart to hear such desire in Peter's voice. To see such poison coursing through him. So he forgives him for it instantly. Because that's all he can do. To begrudge it of him would be futile.

They fight and they break bones and they bleed and they snarl and they snap and they scrape and they scrap. Nails are broken clean off fingers as Peter claws his own floors to get away long enough for him to heal and jump back in again.

And when dawn comes and the darkness passes Peter falls into the best damn sleep he's had in a month.

Gabe keeps watch as he cleans. As he repairs the apartment as best as he can. As he pulls a rug over the deep gouges in the wooden floor from Peter's fingers. He scrubs himself clean in the shower, borrowing ill fitting clothes to replace the ones that were torn to shreds during the night.

Peter doesn't look at him when he rises up from his dead sleep around 3pm. He says nothing as Gabe puts down a cup of fresh, hot coffee with just the right amount of sugar and cream for him. The silence that hangs between them as Gabe sips his tea and Peter eats a hearty, if late, breakfast is uncomfortable and heavy. Heavier than it's been for a very long time.

They still haven't spoken more than two words to each other since Peter woke up when Gabe leaves, murmuring that he'll be back after his classes the next day.

The anniversary of Nathan's murder in June is hard. And Gabe stays away that day.

It doesn't matter.

Peter shows up in the middle of the night and lets himself in. He sits and he watches Gabe silently as he sleeps. He's still there when Gabe wakes up the next morning.

"I felt it again last night."

He doesn't have to ask what. He can see it in his eyes.

"I don't want to keep... going the way we have. I came over here to kill you."

"I don't see any blood, so you must have changed your mind."

"I... I couldn't do it when I saw you asleep there. Not after everything we've been through."

"So you sat and watched me all night like a creep."

"Takes one to know one. Not like you haven't done that before."

"Not to you."

Peter cracks a tired smile and a soft laugh. He leaves when Gabe has to get ready for class.

Peter will deny it was him until the day he might die. Gabe insists it wasn't him who got close enough to cause it. They're both lying through their teeth and they both know it because they can both feel the all telling tingle when people lie.

What started as the routine fistfight to get the violent urges of Peter's battle with the Hunger worked through without killing innocent bystanders became... something a bit more. Fistfulls of hair and cloth and rather forceful wrestling naturally progressed into a strange sort of intimacy that left the dining table broken and the sofa lopsided.

In the hazy twilight hours of the slow moving dawn, Peter lay on his back on the floor of his living room, staring up at the ceiling. Hip touching bloodied hip. "That was..."

"Unexpected."

"I don't feel like killing anyone though."

"Me either."

"Let's never speak of this again."

"Agreed."

They don't speak of it.

But the next time Gabe sees that look in Peter's eye...

They end up going back to IKEA the following day, this time to buy Gabe a new bed frame.

It lasts exactly three weeks before it has to be replaced again.

It's a gradual sort of thing. The Hunger in Peter begins to settle. And the struggle within Gabe lessens over time. Their overnight visits don't always end the same way, but more often than not neither man sleeps on the other's sofa any longer. The violence of their initial couplings ebbs as the Hunger is kept sated more and more often. Peter finds he's spending more and more time in Gabe's crummy little apartment than his own. The small place cluttered with auto parts and books - where all but the most basic of digital timepieces are hidden away or stored somewhere else entirely. It's cozy. It's homey. It's warm and lived in and welcoming while Peter's place is still so... spartan. Sure he has a little more furniture than this time last year, but it's.... Peter finds he only wants to be there when he's not alone.

The commute to work, now that he has his full range of powers back, and then some thanks to Gabe's acquisitions over time as well, is meaningless since he can simply teleport himself there with Hiro's ability.

He's basically moved in with Gabe, who's cramped apartment feels more like home than his own home. Even though the layout is so drastically different, it feels like Gabe's apartment in the world behind the wall. Reminiscent of their secret place. Safe. Secure. And most importantly, they're alone together.

Peter decides it's time to sell his apartment when he's spent two weeks sleeping in Gabe's bed and still haven't bought anything to eat for his own place.

Of course selling his apartment takes a while and it's October before he finally gets a buyer. It's a nice young couple looking for their first place. Only Peter and Gabe know the damage that was done to the place over the years, though to look at the shiny new hardwood floors no one would ever know that Peter lost most of his fingernails the night he clawed up the floor.

Claire finds him after his apartment has sold. The new owners have moved in and she's spitting mad. "Why didn't you tell us you were moving?!"

Peter was just coming out of an employees only entrance at the hospital when she'd accosted him. He looked around for Gabe, who was supposed to meet him there so they could go out for dinner together after he got off work. He didn't see him, or his other more public face around. "Can we talk about this later Claire?"

"You don't answer your phone. You don't even check your voice messages-"

"I check those. Because I hate the alert sounds my phone makes every time I don't."

"Why are you avoiding everyone, Peter?"

"I'm not avoiding you! I've been working."

"You have to sleep sometime."

He's ever so grateful when Gabe shows up that he nearly forgot to use his other name. Nearly. "Ian, thank God. I was starting to think you forgot about me."

Peter is annoyed when Gabe invites Claire to join them for dinner. He's even more annoyed when Claire accepts.

Peter and "his good friend Ian" are invited to have Thanksgiving dinner with Angela the next month. Neither want to go... It's something they had agreed upon behind the wall. Thanksgiving was now a Forbidden Day. Much like Nathan's birthday and his actual death day. But more so because of what Gabe as Sylar but also as Nathan had forced Peter and his mother to endure one year - six years - nine years - ago.

In the end, Claire and Noah were enlisted to threaten to drag Peter to his mother's in Manhattan if he did not come on his own. And yes, he was ordered to bring Ian with him. After all, now that the two were living in sin Ian was part of the family whether he liked it or not. And to Angela Petrelli, who seemed to have family dying off a lot the last few years (though some of them twice, and in Peter's case quite often for a while there) family was everything to the old scheming hag. Even if she had to present her distaste with his chosen lifestyle to her friends in high society. Though if she knew who Ian truly was the distaste wouldn't as much of an act as it was restraint.

They brought shit wine of the wrong color on purpose. Peter made it known to anyone that would listen that he was there under duress.

When they returned home that night, Peter pointed to a hunk of metal and wires and demanded that Gabe take it apart and show him how to put it back together again.

The following day Gabe found him with a laptop open and an application to one of the nursing schools. From behind a steaming cup of coffee, the words "NP training program" slurred sleepily out of his mouth.

December 7th was, technically, a day like any other.

It was also the day arbitrarily chosen as the birthdate for Gabe's new identity.

Even though Gabe chose to wear his public face when they went out for a nice dinner and a movie, it was nice. It was calm. It was... normal in a way neither of them had been in a very long time. And when Gabe blew out a single candle on a single large cupcake, Peter realized it was a year since the last time anything major happened... not counting the first of April when he'd gotten sick and somehow got his full powers back. A year since the nightmare world. A year since Claire jumped and threatened to expose them to the world. A year since his enemy became his friend and his friend became his ... something that he couldn't quite accurately label or describe.

He watched as Gabe cut the cupcake with surgical precision and put the other half on it's side and slid the saucer down the counter to him to share. "Here."

"No, it's your rebirthday. Your cake."

"And I wouldn't be half the man I am now if you hadn't come to get me."

"I had my own reasons. I didn't do it for you."

And when he smiles, Peter can't help the feeling he gets, the pleasant sort of warmth that squirms and wriggles and writhes in his gut. It's an honest smile. A content smile. Something that a year - six years - ago was so foreign and alien on that face that to see it would have struck fearful confusion into anyone who had known the man he was before. But now? Now it sent a thrill up Peter's spine that before the return of his powers - the return of the Hunger he had known only briefly before - he had never felt even when he had thought himself deeply in love. All of what came before was a pale imitation of what that small smile did to him now.

They should have known it was too quiet. Too easy a life they lived together in their quiet Brooklyn apartment barely big enough for two. But for that night, nothing else mattered but the two of them and the awkwardly shared cupcake, crap wine, and the sweat soaked sheets of their steel reinforced bed.

Rebel did what he could, but somehow the truth still came out.

Claire had been quite busy in the year since she had jumped. Since Rebel and the New-Old Company had covered up everything as a hoax and a publicity stunt.

On the morning of December 8, 2011 Claire Bennet appeared on some seemingly random live talk show for housewives and hospital waiting rooms. The topic of the day was 'Incredible Life Stories' and Claire was there with a whopper. A viral video sensation was tracked down from grainy cell phone video.

That morning, as Claire told her story and even demonstrated her ability before a live studio audience and millions of bored and lonely housewives across the US, they learned that Rebel had missed one video in his data purge.

And just like that, the world at large learned about the Specials.

And the clock started ticking down until the novelty would wear off and the fear of the unknown would begin to settle in.

2011 rolled lazily into 2012, despite the revelation of super-humans walking among them.

Gabe finished his certification program. The following week he had a job at a garage a few miles from the apartment. He was good - he was perfect - at what he did now. When he fixed a car, it stayed fixed. Often better than factory, his boss told people. With the quality of the work done by the shop improving, they became busier. Business was booming. And Gabe was making enough to cover the bills a little easier.

Which is why when Peter was caught using his powers at work, by accident, and he was given the ultimatum of quit or be fired, he had no problems walking away.

It gave him more time to work on his studies anyway. But with only one income again, they weren't exactly comfortable.

But the boy scout and the murderer-turned-mechanic were content with the life they had.

And if Peter had more "episodes" and lapses in judgement from time to time than usual well, Gabe was well versed in how boredom can affect the Hunger, and was more than happy to ensure he had the time to properly devote to Peter when he was staring into the abyss. Though the steel reinforcement on the bed proved to be less effective than they had originally anticipated.

Claire and Gretchen broke up.

It was ugly.

Very ugly.

And all over the papers. After all, not only was Claire the most recognized face of the next stage of human evolution, but it had come out that she was the late Senator Petrelli's illegitimate daughter. So of course the press was going to be all into her business.

Claire had moved into the Petrelli house with Angela in New York. She became a more regular fixture in Peter's life whether he liked it or not.

And she was very insistent that she get to see Peter's place. And he was very insistent that she not. He'd rather keep his privacy just that. Private. She might want to be known to the world, but what about people like him? People like Micah or God forbid Parkman and Molly? People with powers that could be used and twisted and abused - whos powers HAD been twisted and abused at some point whether of their own free will like Parkman's case or by force like Molly and Micah's.

"The last time people knew where I lived," Peter had snapped at her bitterly over tea the most recent time he'd been ordered to come visit his mother, "I ended up tazed by one of your dads, betrayed by the other, drugged, and packed on a plane against my will. And we ALL know how that turned out, Claire."

"But it doesn't have to be that way anymore, Peter. Now that they know about us, we can show them-"

"No. I like my peace and quiet. I don't want a circus outside my door and windows. And I don't want people to know what I can do! In case you've forgotten your own dad - both of them - have tried to use me or kill me for what I can do! I'm dangerous, Claire. And the moment those people out there realize that then I'll be public enemy number one. Or two, depending on who they find that's worse than me."

"You don't mean that."

"I do. I'm a killer, Claire. I don't mean to be, but it's true. Sure the time I killed someone was in a timeline that ceased to exist, but it doesn't change the fact that I did it and I still have to live with that. Hell, look at all the times we've BOTH killed Sylar. Mark my words, Claire. When they get tired of fawning over the girl who can't die, they'll start looking at the rest of us and when they do they won't find us as amusing as they do you."

"You're just being paranoid!"

"It's not paranoia if it keeps you alive," he replied, draining his tea and putting his cup down before leaving the table. "Good talk. Tell Ma I'll be in touch when I have time."

There was a knock on their door two weeks later.

Neither one heard it, as... distracted as they were in the bedroom.

Not until they heard the click of the safety on a gun that was hastily drawn outside their bedroom door.

They didn't have much time after that to make themselves decent. Gabe had just barely been able to change into his Ian persona when the bedroom door was flung open and an exasperated Claire looked back at them, the gun lowering but not completely. Just... not pointed at them anymore.

"Do you mind! We were just having the best sex I've had in ages!"

"Ian!" Peter barks at him.

"What? If she made it this far then clearly she heard you screaming while I-"

"Not now!" Peter hisses. "What the hell Claire!"

"I was worried, alright!" And she raises the gun again, pointing it at Gabe. "And you!"

"What about me?"

"He was calling you Gabe."

"Because it's my name. I certainly hope he was screaming my name and not some other guy's while he's having sex with me." When the gun isn't lowered, Gabe sighs and rolls his eyes. Peter's cheeks are no longer red from exertion but from embarrassment as he wraps the blanket tighter around his waist to hide his nakedness. "Peter, could you get my wallet from the nightstand. Top drawer."

Peter scoffs. "If I didn't know where you kept your stuff by now, I never will." But he fetches the wallet. It's an obnoxiously green and orange neon colored velcro number Gabe had found in a charity bin somewhere. It was such an eyesore that he'd brought it home to annoy Peter with and it sort of... became part of his regular personal effects. The man certainly hadn't lost it since he started using it.

The wallet was tossed across the bed, and Gabe caught it, making slow movements so Claire wouldn't get trigger happy. He pulls out his ID and offers it to her. "See? Just as I said."

She snatches the ID from him and takes a look. "Seriously? It's got Gabriel and Gray right here. Do you really think I'm that stupid Peter?"

"You want to run my social? I mean, it'll only go as far back as 2003 when I got citizenship but I can dig out my Canadian ID too if you like."

After another tense half hour, Gabe was cheerfully making coffee for everyone as Peter was lecturing Claire in that way only Peter the Italian Eagle Scout could - the way that always seemed to make Nathan even question what the hell he was doing with his life. She was sitting at their lopsided second-hand table in a mis-matched chair with a different colored and styled leg than the rest, glaring down at the spot that soon a cup of black coffee was slid into.

When Peter had finally finished with all he had to say, Claire glared at him. "I was worried, okay. You started distancing yourself from us, from me. You start disappearing more and more and don't even get me started on last Thanksgiving-"

"It's called having a life, Claire. In case you haven't noticed I haven't had much of one since I saved your life the first time. I haven't had anyone trying to kill me for over a year. I haven't had to fight bad guys, save the world, stop evil corporations, prevent plagues, jump through time and space... Is it really so wrong of me to take a step back and just enjoy my life a little?"

"You can do both."

"No, I can't and you know it. Your stunt on live TV cost me my job. The moment I slipped and used my powers at work, I was hauled in and told to quit or I was fired. There's no protections for people like us. Luckily the garage Ian works at is booming otherwise we wouldn't be able to pay the bills even on this crummy little place."

"And there will never be protections if we don't come forward and demand them."

"Claire they don't even see us as human. Right now there's just fear lurking beneath the shiny new fascination. But all it takes is one Sylar. One person like Sylar and I can guarantee you that they'll turn on us. Petty discrimination will turn into a witch hunt. Remember what ma showed us at Coyote Sands? Imagine that, but backed by a government budget. It won't be too different than what your own father and Building 26 tried to do to us. I loved Nathan, and even though he came around there at the end, I'll never forgive what he did. And it will happen again."

When Claire left, he told her to lose his address. Or at the very least, call him first before coming over and pointing a damn gun at his partner. After both men were certain she was long gone, Gabe became himself again and refilled Peter's coffee with a raised brow. "Partner, Peter?"

"Well it sounds a hell of a lot better than calling you my boyfriend now doesn't it?"

"You really mean that?"

Peter rolls his eyes and takes the cup from him, fingers brushing fingers and lingering just a little too long. "Who else can put up with my melodrama and insane family this long and come out the other side more sane than they were when they were dragged in?"

"I don't know... I hear there's this serial killer lurking out there somewhere who might have a problem with his mortal enemy suddenly deciding to retire." An amused smile twitches the corners of his mouth just so.

Peter's eyes crinkle as he tried not to laugh. "Well, he's just going to have to find something else to amuse him when he's bored. Maybe get a job like everyone else. I heard he's good with his hands. Good at fixing things... I can think of a few things around here that need to be patched up. The bed seems a bit rickety lately..."

Claire meets with Peter in a cafe close to the nursing school he goes to for the Nurse Practitioner program found. They have coffee.

She's in sunglasses and a wig.

He's in scrubs since it's after class and they'd had practicals that day.

"I'm... sorry. About breaking into your apartment. I thought, I mean, it sounded like-"

"Like I was having really great and really loud sex?" he replies smugly.

"Now that I look back on it, yes. But at the time I heard pained grunting and you shouting the name of a serial killer. What was I supposed to think was happening?."

"And you thought you'd come and save me. Trust me, if I was being attacked by Sylar, you'd probably be one of the first to know." He buys her a bagel with cream cheese as a peace offering. She buys him a blueberry muffin.

"Are you done having Noah investigate Ian yet?"

"Peter!"

"Am I wrong?" Her silence is telling. "Please tell me you haven't discovered he has some deep dark secret or he's an axe murderer or something."

She admits she had him looked into. And aside from traffic tickets, his parents divorcing, and two fights in high school before dropping out and getting his GED, the man's squeaky clean. She buys him another apology muffin. "It's just so weird, Peter. His name I mean. What are the chances of you finding a man with THAT name as part of his own name?"

"Surprisingly high," he comments before he realizes it. His brain had already figured out the statistics without even really thinking about it. "What? Given the age range Ian, Sylar, and I all fall into Gabriel is a very common and surprisingly popular name. Factor in that the Petrellis are Catholic, which raises the probability of choosing the name of an angel or a saint for your kid, especially a boy, and factor in that even devout Protestants, like Ian's parents were and from what little we know about Sylar's mother she was really into God and Jesus... the likelihood of finding another Gabriel in New York City was extremely high. Nearly as high as finding more Peters and second only to Michael in name popularity given the same factors."

Claire stared at him, eyes slightly wide before Peter realizes what he's said and how it sounded and starts picking at his second muffin before taking a sip of his lukewarm coffee. "Sorry. I... I guess all that time I spent trapped with him he kind of rubbed off on me a bit."

"A bit? Peter since when did you... Oh God. You didn't....." She lowers her voice and leans forward after glancing around. "You didn't accidentally copy THAT power the night of the carnival, did you?"

Peter stares at her, his mind whirring with the possibilities and not liking any outcome of telling even a version of the truth. Finally, he sighs and settles on a common power he's come across as a paramedic. He reaches forward, pretending he doesn't notice her flinch as he touches a finger to her coffee cup. Suddenly, it's steaming again. "Does THAT look like his power to you?"

"Did you just-"

"Basically I... I microwaved your coffee for you. Got it from some old lady at the grocery store a few weeks ago. It's really handy when I need to reheat my lunches and everyone else is using the only microwave."

They fall into idle chatter for the remainder of the visit. When they leave, ready to part ways on the street outside, Claire grasps his hand tightly. "You haven't seen or heard from him since the Carnival, have you?"

He shakes his head. The lie falls easily from his lips. Part of him knows he shouldn't, but the newly selfish part of him refuses to let go of the fragile existence he's built with Gabe. "He checks in, sometimes. Only every few months and never long enough for Rebel to trace the calls. He hasn't relapsed as far as we can tell. No news reports of mysterious murders."

"Doesn't mean he isn't still..."

"If he does, I'll be right there to handle it. Just like always. But that's pretty much the only thing I'll let myself be dragged back in for. I don't care if my mother has another vision and only my smiling face and floppy hair can stop the end of the world. I won't let myself be used like that again."

They embrace, and he feels a pang of guilt in the darkness that now rests in the corner of his soul.

Oh, he'd handle it alright. But he isn't so sure anymore that he'd stop Gabriel or help him hide the bodies.

When he gets home, he finds Gabe sitting at the table. He's brought some work home with him. A transmission this time. Peter joins him at the table, watching with mild interest as he's picking it apart to try and find the problem. "How'd it go with Claire?"

"She had you looked into."

"Of course she did. She wasn't going to let it go until she knew for sure."

"She asked me if I copied your power by accident that night at the carnival. I started talking about statistics and probabilities and-"

"And you sounded a lot like me. What did you tell her?"

Peter doesn't answer. "Crap wine and a bad movie before bed?"

He doesn't even blink at the change of subject. The man's body language alone screams that he doesn't want to talk about it. He doesn't want to be reminded how easy it is now to lie to his family's faces. "You won't get mad if I read while you watch it will you?"

Peter reaches out and touches his arm, giving it a little squeeze. "No. Just sitting there with me is enough."

"Alright. Let me finish this and get a shower."

Before the end of the month the two men lay tangled in the sheets of a seedy motel in Ottawa, cheap pawn store rings turned to gold fitting snugly on each of their hands.

It was a spur of the moment decision. Almost a dare or a challenge. But it was also silent admission of things both had already considered individually but had yet to bring up in spoken word to the other. Their lives, even as opposites and enemies, were linked from the moment either one had first learned of the Cheerleader. In a way, it was Claire that could be credited for bringing them together. After that... well... it was a quirk of fate that forced them to push harder, push faster and become stronger if only to be ready to face one another again and again in a desperate struggle to overcome the enemy.

And now... Now they needed each other like they needed air and food and water to live. They had ruined each other for anyone else. They had reshaped one another, molded themselves to fit together in a way that no one else could match. They filled the gaping holes in each other's personality and lives. Together, to Peter at least, they made one fully functioning average adult between the two of them.

By the time they returned to New York after a few days in Ottawa, there was a package waiting for them. New IDs for Peter... with a word of caution that Rebel was sure people he didn't want to know would find out eventually.

Petrelli was dropped in favor of Graymalkin, which Peter thought kind of funny even if Gabe didn't get the joke. He bought him an issue of Young X-Men as a belated wedding gift. The only thing Gabe had to say in response after reading it was he hoped to still be so good looking when he's 200 years old.

Before the year was up, Claire found out who Ian really was. To say she was angry was an understatement. She called him every horrible name she could think of.

It wasn't as if they were expecting Angela to show up to their apartment when he'd never even told her where he lived now. And of course where Angela went, the Hatian was sure to follow.

They never did find out why Angela had sought him out after Gabe, who'd been sitting innocently in his favorite chair working on a neighbor's scooter in return of a favor from earlier in the week, had shifted from the red haired and slightly freckled Ian into the all too familiar bogeyman the ex-cheerleader believed he had secretly been anyway.

With irrefutable proof now blinking owlishly at her from across the room, accusations were thrown around. A gun was drawn - she never left home without it these days - and threats were issued. Peter pointed out that with Rene there Gabe couldn't hurt them even if he had wanted to and like hell he was going to let them lay a finger on him either.

Part of Peter wants them to stay. Part of Gabe does, too. It's the part of them that naturally seeks out approval and acceptance from those who are supposed to give it in support. The parts of them that long for connection and family... But they both know it won't turn out in their favor if that happens. So instead, each man enjoys the relief that floods them when the Hunger - ever present and ever whispering their darkest and most primal desires in the back of their minds - is well and truly silenced for this short time. For these moments, they are simply Peter and Gabe. Two normal, average guys with no powers and no dark secrets hiding beneath their bent steel frame bed.

Angela reminded him that one good deed does not a hero make. Peter told her she can take her words and shove them where the sun hasn't shone for decades. Gabe laughed. Claire fired her gun and missed Peter by a few inches. Gabe's laughing stopped. "Police response time during this part of the day in this neighborhood is approximately twenty minutes, provided Mr. and Mrs. DeSoto two blocks down haven't been fighting again."

"It's Tuesday."

"Oh, Mr. DeSoto's payday... That leaves... sixteen minutes and counting. And the old woman in the apartment above us loves to call the police on everyone."

"Anne Marie's a busybody. She's probably already started checking the phone tree for each floor to find out where the gunshot came from."

Gabe sighed. "Fourteen minutes. If you don't want to give a statement, I suggest the three of you leave. Peter, find out where the slug went and dispose of it would you? I'd rather not spend my week trying to bail your niece out jail for attempted homicide."

When the police showed up just as Gabe had said they would and approximately when he said they would, both men had made their apartment look like an attempted robbery and home invasion. It wasn't hard once Rene had left and they could use various powers to lightly trash the place.

"Well..." Gabe said once they had settled beneath the blankets that night. "As far as birthdays go... a little more excitement than I was expecting. Should we expect a SWAT team to kick in our door for yours?"

"Shut up and go to sleep, Gabe."

Claire only saw him one more time shortly after the New Year. And that was because she wasn't told he was coming to see his mother who had insisted she wanted to just talk. Insisted that he come clean with his secrets. So he goes, with no intention of coming completely clean, but enough to keep the meddling old woman at bay for a time.

Claire slaps him in the face, making sure to catch his cheek with her rings for a little extra emphasis, before she storms off and slams the door behind her.

Peter sits down to tea with his mother, but doesn't drink a drop of it. She knows he suspects she's either poisoned it or drugged it. And he wouldn't put it past her if she did. Both know, as she watches the cuts in Peter's cheek from Claire's rings heal, and he wipes the blood away with a napkin, that even if she did do something to his drink, it wouldn't really have any effect.

The silence is heavy and filled with so many questions and assumptions.

"I warned you not to go after him. But you never listen. You just had to go and set him free after Parkman had him contained and neutralized."

"Don't tell me you dreamed this, ma. Don't lie to my face."

"I didn't... but I suspected it might happen. He killed one son and now he's taken the other from me. Turned you into a monster just like him."

"I'm not."

"But you are, Peter. I don't need to dream the future to see what you've become. Have you helped him kill yet? Or does he just have you help hide the bodies?"

"It's not like that. Gabe's not like that anymore. He hasn't killed anyone since Nathan."

She stirred her tea and her composure hardened. Her tone taking on an almost business-like quality. "I can assume that leaving him is out of the question," she says, glaring at the golden ring on Peter's hand as it wraps around the teacup for want of something to keep it busy. "The only thing that can be done is to move forward then. You will keep him away from Claire and you will keep him under control. The moment we even suspect-"

"I'll put a bullet in his kill spot. Believe it or not, it was actually part of our wedding vows. Same for me if I lose control and am about to go nuclear. The priest up in Ottawa thought it was some weird joke between us. But we meant every word."

Angela is quiet and considering for a moment before giving a small, tight nod. "All of the... personal issues I have with this aside, you do realize that I cannot be seen condoning your lifestyle choices in polite society."

"Of course. Wouldn't want to upset the other old hags at the weekly Bridge club with your deviant child's sinful ways."

"If, for any reason, you must bring him with you to any function I require your presence at, he will maintain his false persona and you will conduct yourselves as discreetly as possible. However, I will endeavour to ensure I do not need you." Peter gives her a look, and she continues. "Claire, now that the public is aware of our relation, is a suitable companion to various social functions I may require a guest to attend with. It will also do her good to learn how to navigate the cut throat world in which she now finds herself. You never were very good at politics."

"Backstabbing and betrayal you mean."

"Oh no, Peter. If anything, you became a master of those without even trying. I mean, look at who you've tied yourself to." The tone was light, and mildly amused. But it was only to cover the insult behind a smile.

There was a murder in San Jose. The circumstances pointed to a special. The power that was used was similar to, but not quite, one that Gabe had and Peter had copied. The victim's head had been turned to pure silver. Rene showed up on their doorstep the day after with Noah Bennet.

Both men had a clear alibi, and when Rene stopped suppressing their powers, they willingly reminded Noah their touch turned things to gold, not silver.

There was another murder in New Jersey. Similar to the Sylar murders and once again, Bennet and the Hatian were at their door. It was luck, or perhaps fate, that had saved them that time. Rebel hacked Bennet's phone and sent him pictures of Samson Gray, alive and mostly well.

"What the hell is this?"

"Did the murders you're accusing me of this time happen near Newark?" Gabe doesn't wait for an answer. "I inherited my real ability from my biological father. He lives in New Jersey. I thought the cancer would have gotten him by now. I can give you the last place I saw him if you like."

Bennet doesn't trust him, but the Hatian nods his head regardless.

By the end of the week, Peter and Gabe have moved into a new apartment in Queens. It's slightly bigger, and the commute to work isn't that great for Gabe. But they manage. It gives them more peace of mind. Of course if Angela, Bennet, or anyone else connected to them wanted to find either of them it wouldn't be too hard. But it helped put them back at ease at least.

Peter did not see his mother again for a long time, but near the end of 2012 he received a card on his birthday. It only had her signature rather than the more meaningful epithets to show her place as his mother still. Included was a gift card for a place he'd never willingly shop at, and even if he had the gift card might cover one tenth of the price of the cheapest things in the shop.

The year of 2013 was mostly quiet. Peter got a job after completing the NP program, and found he quite enjoyed working at the small clinic in Hell's Kitchen. It kept him busy and kept him from thinking too much about what he gave up to keep what he'd managed to scrape together.

It also showed him the ugly side he had predicted to Claire a few years before. Most didn't see them as human. Not with stories about Evos - that's what they were called now - in the news caught using their powers to steal. To hurt. To kill. Once in a while Gabe would hear on the radio about a woman who floated up to rescue a cat from a tree. Or about the teenage boy who fought off muggers for an old woman with his super strength.

Claire's face was often on television as the Voice of the Evos. She continued to preach her ideal of working and living together in peace. Enriching each other's lives and striving for equality and a better tomorrow. Suresh, they'd heard, had taken to the lecture circuit in academia and was laughed out of nearly everywhere despite his solid proof and evidence that Evos were simply another natural stage in human evolution and that they all lived in a period of evolutionary transition.

Hospitals couldn't turn Evos away, but made it clear with their treatment that they weren't wanted among the normal people. The clinic Peter worked in saw an increase in patients of all ages and walks of life, stabilized then kicked out the door as soon as possible from the hospitals.

It got to the point where many Evos didn't even try and ended up self medicating.

Many that self medicated died.

Others... learned about the small clinics that started opening up.

When Peter's boss found out he had powers, she offered to pay for him to go to medical school and become a real doctor rather than just a Nurse Practitioner. He refused, telling her that the time would be wasted. It was better spent working in the clinic, helping as many people like him as possible while he still could.

Gabe's boss found out about his powers by accident when an engine that wasn't quite as secure as he'd thought came crashing down from a car up on the jacks and nearly crushed him beneath it. When the crunch never came, he looked up to see Gabe's hands extended and some invisible force holding the engine steady above him. "Move very slowly and very carefully to the left, George. I won't let it fall, but it is pretty heavy."

They never spoke about it, but he was warned not to let anyone else know. Never to let anyone else see.

He'd have fired Gabe on the spot if not for the fact that he was the best damn mechanic in the shop and to lose him would lose the place a lot of business. George had nothing against "their kind" personally. But he knew a lot of people took exception to "them" and if word got out... it could ruin his business.

Hiro Nakamura disappeared in March 2013 without a trace.

His sister Kimiko and her husband Ando became the CEOs of Yamagato Industries.

A new online MMO game hits the market soon after Hiro's disappearance. It becomes very popular very quickly.

Angela Petrelli has a dream of the end of the world. While most would see that as nothing out of the norm, as it wouldn't be the first time she's dreamed such a thing, Angela herself is left shaken and slightly confused by it.

Peter dreams about a four year old boy with blond hair teleporting in and out of a kitchen, laughing as Gabe is making waffles and stealing blueberries every time the man looks away from the bowl next to the waffle iron.

Mother and son are still not talking to one another. So neither learns what the other has seen of their futures.

Claire was attacked and forced to go into hiding on December 8th, the anniversary of the (second) time she exposed the Evos to the world. Anti-Evo protesters claimed credit. The news coverage turns to speculation on Nathan Petrelli's other children. "New studies" have shown Evos often inherit their powers from their parents or grandparents, and people begin to ask what was the late Senator Petrelli REALLY hiding?

After a particularly scummy "news" report about Nathan's illegitimate daughter and speculation on whether or not his other two children were Evos, Gabe destroyed their television and told Peter not to replace it. It was an old anger - an anger that wasn't even his own - that had welled up inside him. Some remnant of Nathan's personality that had been buried too deep to fully purge had risen up to the surface in protest the moment Monty and Simon were mentioned in a way that could, ultimately, bring the boys to great harm.

Peter brought him a box of broken radios and assorted junk the next day after work. Gabe couldn't sleep so instead he kept his hands busy when he wasn't pinning a very willing Peter to the bed and jackhammering him through their fourth bed in three years.

He raged and he roared and when the anger had passed and the need to hunt and harm and maim and kill those who dared even mention the names of the two remaining Petrelli boys, painting them with the tainted brush of their ill fated father, had at last subsided he was left feeling hollow and empty and exhausted. And then...

"I think..." Gabe said softly into the night. "I think he's finally gone, Peter."

"Who?"

"Nathan."

The bed shifts. A hand comes down to rest over his rapidly beating heart. Fingers idly comb through sweat slicked chest hair. But it's not a gentle touch. Fingers press down firmly with each stroke, threatening to claw through his skin and dig. Dig and dig and crack his sternum to get to and strangle his still beating heart. He knows better than to say the name out loud. To say it in times like this. But this time it needed to be said out loud.

Lips press against his shoulder. He can feel the teeth grazing his skin behind them. The tip of a tongue flicking out to taste his sweat. His desire. His fear. "Peter?" he asked hesitantly when the other man pulled away suddenly.

A blanket is pulled up from the foot of the bed by hand rather than by powers. They sleep soundly the rest of the night and through the next day.

In October they learn that Rebel has gone even further underground. There's rumours of a resistance movement led by a man calling himself HeroTruther.

Peter gets another insulting gift card for his birthday. This time with exactly ninety-nine cents on it.

The card is for a popular chain of dollar stores.

It's not even enough to pay for a candy bar when tax is included.

Peter and Gabe ring in 2014 by watching the clinic where Peter worked burn down after being evacuated.

When it became known that it was where Evos went for medical help, the Norms started vandalizing the place. Breaking in after hours and stealing medications and supplies. And still, the place refused to turn Evos away. Many of the staff actually came forward as Evos themselves after learning Peter had an ability.

It was common to scrub off or paint over such enthusiastic messages as "Die Evo Scum" and "Mutie Animals" or any number of equally creative statements they found on their walls, doors, and rarely not broken windows.

The only saving grace was that the records were all burned with the building. At least no one would know the names of the Evo children that regularly came to the clinic for care.

Gabe quietly rented out a small office space in a not-so-decent part of Queens with their savings and scrounged around trying to find at least some rudimentary equipment. He surprised Peter with it for Valentines Day, apologizing for using up what they had saved for emergencies but he knew Peter would have a hard time finding another job, especially when it was known he worked in an Evo clinic.

"Let it travel word of mouth. Let the rest of the staff know. You can't pay them, obviously, but I know you. You'll go off and do something crazy if you don't have something to focus on. Helping people is your focus activity. Just as fixing broken timepieces and cars is mine."

Peter doesn't keep track of how many times he treats gunshot wounds from scared Evos that had only gone outside to check their mail. Or gone to the corner store for some milk. He does what he can with his limited equipment and supplies.

Gabe procures as many medical books as he can. Most of them are outdated cast offs, but there's good information in them. He reads them so he better understands what Peter is talking about. Peter reads them so he can better treat his patients.

The Evos call it the Hidden Clinic. Unless you know exactly how to find it and where to go, you'll walk right past it.

The news gets out though, through the underground. HeroTruther makes sure the right people know. The people who need it know. Other back-room Evo doctors start popping up across the country.

By the time Peter has had another dream about the four year old teleporting boy, there's two traveling clinics criss-crossing the country. Going where they're needed most. One is run out of an old RV. The other from a trailer pulled by an old, beat-up tow truck.

A sense of foreboding comes with the month of June. One of the Forbidden Days is coming. A day that both men dread. Even with the last remnants of Nathan now gone from Gabe's psyche, it's still a day that neither man wants to face but yet they must.

They never make it that far, though.

Peter hears from his mother for the first time since the fall out of Gabe's real identity. It is the night of June 10th. Her voice is laced with fear and sleep. She's just woken from a terrible nightmare and, for some reason, her first instinct was to call her son.

Peter had only answered the phone to make it stop ringing at him so he could go back to sleep. He doesn't know why he didn't just hang up on her... no. He knows why.

He misses his mother.

Gabe gets up, unable to get back to sleep without his human shaped body pillow to burrow against. He starts making a pot of coffee and an early breakfast.

The morning of June 12th Peter knocks on the door of a hotel suite. The door is pulled open and mother and son embrace tightly. She's haggard and hasn't been able to sleep for fear of what she will see again. Peter tries to talk her down. Reassure her that the nightmare visions can be avoided.

"No, they can't."

"Yes, they can ma."

"Peter-"

"I know because I saw it. You've been dreaming of the end of the world, but I've been seeing something different." He pulls a notebook out of his overnight bag and hands it to her. "Go on. Have a look."

She turns through the pages. Peter's no artist, but he does well enough to get the point across. "How am I seeing a different future?"

"Maybe... Maybe I die."

"You've dreamed about your own death before, and past it. This doesn't make sense. Gabe thinks-"

"I hope you left that psychopath at home."

Peter shakes his head and sighs. "I left him in the lobby to get us a room. Didn't think you'd want him in here with you."

"Send him away."

"No, ma. He stays, or I leave. That's how this works now. Gabe and me, we're a package deal. And if you'll take another look at that notebook, you'll see it has to be that way."

Eventually, Angela relents. As long as she doesn't have to see him, she will tolerate knowing he's in the same building.

"After I told Gabe what you said to me on the phone, about your vision, he thinks we might be seeing two different outcomes of the same event. One where tragedy is avoided and one where it isn't. But they are both existing at the same time. Like Schrodinger's cat. And we won't know which is which until the time comes and it's too late to change it."

What Peter does not yet know is that it is already too late and that from this point forward all he can do is fight and rage against the inevitable.

They don't accompany her to the Unity Summit, instead opting to wait for her at the all too familiar Burnt Toast Diner in Midland.

Soon after they arrived and put in their order for waffles and omelettes the ground shook and people began to run to the windows or outside. They looked across the table at one another with a sense of foreboding. Quick as a flash Peter and Gabe joined the bystanders out on the street looking towards Odessa. Fear gripped his heart as instinctively Peter reached for Gabe. The second fingers entwined with his own they were gone, teleporting into the chaos.

"Go find my mother!"

"And what will YOU do?"

"I'm a goddamn nurse, Gabe! What the hell do you think?!"

After over an hour of searching, Gabe found Angela Petrelli, checking her over for any injuries. She had a concussion and had to have been in shock. Otherwise she wouldn't have clung to him as hard as she did. She wouldn't have thanked him for pulling her out of the rubble and begged him to help her find Claire. Claire who had to be buried in the rubble somewhere. Claire who, she'd just learned, was pregnant.

Darkness still hung overhead, but now it was not the thick clouds from some unknown Evo terrorist blocking out the sun and the abilities of those gathered. It was smoke and ash blotting the skies. Gabe dug. Down and down into the rubble. Pushing himself for all he was worth to find more bodies. Twisted and broken and dear God the smell. The smell of burning flesh in the smouldering rubble.

But still he persisted. Using all of the powers at his disposal that could be useful without realizing that he had copied some of them from Peter.

He didn't realize his phone was ringing in his pocket until he felt an old, wrinkled hand touch his arm at the elbow. When he turned she flinched, an old instinct in her as prey facing down an angry predator. Then he heard the sound from his pocket.

He put down the chunk of stone and block he'd dragged off another poor dead Evo's body and staggered back, catching his breath as dirt and blood covered hands fumbled for his phone. "Peter? Peter I found Angela. She said... She said Claire was-" Gabe stops as he listens. His forehead creases as he nods, not caring that the man on the other end doesn't see him. "Are you sure? She can't be, Peter. She's- No, listen to me she CAN'T be.... Alright. We're coming. Which hospital? Don't do anything stupid."

"Peter found Claire?"

"She's dying." He takes her a little too roughly by the arm than he meant to and tries to focus. It's a little harder, sometimes, for him to master something he has copied rather than killed for. And this one he's certain he's lifted from Peter. Has even stopped a clock a time or two, but he hadn't wanted to test it further. The temptation... the guilt that ate at him alongside the Hunger was too much. Gabe simply couldn't trust himself with such an ability if he did learn to control it. But now with the roads clogged and the chaos surrounding them and the time - God there wasn't enough TIME - he had to try.

"Hang on and don't panic. Peter's the one that teleports us places."

That is all the warning Angela gets before she feels a sudden, jarring shift in her perception and lands hard on the pavement on the top of a parking garage. They are nowhere near where he needs to be. "Damn. One more try. I'll get it right this time."

When they touch down in the ladies restroom in the hospital... Angela promptly vomits on his shoes. "I. Have. A. Concussion!" she shouts at him after, wiping at her mouth with the back of her hand.

Peter is sitting with his head in his hands when the door opens. He doesn't even bother to look up when he hears two sets of feet crossing the room to stand by the windows.

"Peter Petrelli? I did not expect to see you here." Hiro's voice is soft and filled with concern.

Peter rubs a hand down his face and sighs tiredly. "The last I heard you'd disappeared for good."

"Not for good. You can never keep the master of Time and Space trapped forever."

Peter's smile is weak, and fades as he turns his attention to the other man. He's a little older than Peter remembers. "Noah."

"Peter."

"I'm sorry. When I found her I swear, I didn't know. I thought- but when she wasn't healing-"

"You found Claire?"

"Noah, Claire didn't- I mean she's not-"

His broken speech is interrupted as the door opens again. Noah draws his gun but Hiro doesn't make a move. Peter turns to see his mother, her head bandaged and a few more peeking out from beneath her bloodied blouse. The man with her crosses the room and uncaring of the others present pulls Peter up from his chair and into his arms and Peter lets him. He buries his face in Gabe's shoulder and holds on tight. Hiro moves quickly to help Angela into the same chair as Noah keeps his gun trained on the killer in their midst.

His gun, though, lowers when Angela finally speaks. "Claire is dead."

"How? That's impossible!"

"I don't know, Noah," Angela said as Peter finally pulls away, just a little. The two men are whispering quietly back and forth to the side, Peter nodding every so often and willing himself to take slow, measured breaths. "She is dead. But her children are not."

It is in that moment Angela realizes a decision must be made. As she looks from her only real friend to what little remains of her family, she does not know if it is the right decision, but knowing what she now knows there can be no other way. "Hiro. We need to take Claire's children where they can be raised away from the danger we currently face. As things are we cannot do what needs to be done. We need more time."

Hiro glances at Peter and frowns. He does not like what he suspects she is trying to say, but given how he escaped his own imprisonment and Peter's involvement in that event, he understands that there is no other choice. "We must move as quickly as possible before Renautus learns about the children. It is the only way."

The plan was simple. Hiro would take the five of them to an obscure location in 1999.

Angela would raise the twins, Nathan and Malina, with Peter and Gabriel as their protection. She didn't like relying on the man who had killed half her family but the needs of the many were far more important. And given the time period they were going to be living through, the twins would need only the best protection to remain off of Primatech of the past's radar.

Unfortunately, she forgot to account for Peter's irritatingly strange and often whimsical luck.

No sooner had they arrived in the past than Hiro discovered he could no longer use his ability. In fact, he didn't have one at all.

"He's like dad," Peter had realized.

Angela agreed with his conclusion. "They cannot be raised together. Whatever power Malina has, it will be needed to avert disaster along with her brother's. We cannot risk her losing it before the H.E.L.E. is due to occur. We need to split up."

"I'll go with Hiro and the boy," Gabe suggests, but Peter shakes his head.

"No. I have to. The way you can copy powers is different. It's not like me and it's not like my dad. I can help him control it and try to change it so he doesn't steal the powers when he copies them. Besides, she might hate you but I think ma's a lot safer from her past self and the goon squad with you looking out for them."

And so the second plan was quickly decided and hashed out.

Peter and Gabe said their goodbyes, making peace with the fact that if they ever did see one another again, it wouldn't be for a very long time. The idea of their separation prompting the rarest of declarations from Gabe's lips as he tended not to use the L word often. Hell, Peter can't remember the last time Gabe had actually said he'd loved him was.

Unfortunately, Angela also forgot to take into account once the second plan was decided and set that when Peter is involved, one must also add weight to the likelihood of things going wrong and multiply it by how many Petrelli's are currently present at the same time. Hiro passed the baby to Peter, and after the boy gave a shrill cry both he and Peter were gone so suddenly and unexpectedly that it took a few moments before they noticed Gabe had also disappeared.

Peter, going by the name Elias Mitchell-Graymalkin sat on the balcony of the apartment he shared with his husband, Gabriel Ian Graymalkin, and their adopted son Noah. The sliding door is left open and he can smell the scent of freshly made waffles in the air wafting from the kitchen. Laughter here and there from the blond boy teleporting too and fro, snatching blueberries from his father's bowl by the waffle iron.

He stared down at his sketchbook, the blind desire to draw and sketch having at last faded, and he sighed, tapping the page with the orange wax stub from Noah's crayon box. He tossed it into the plastic case and flipped back through the pages. Each one dated, each one carefully catalogued starting with a week after they had arrived in 1995.

He'd nearly filled this sketchbook. Another was waiting in the bedroom in a box at the top of the closet. Peter sighed as he recalled the notebook he'd shown his mother just days before the Odessa attack. Sketches and drawings of visions from what he had thought to be the future. And they were, of a sort. He was living it now, just in the past.

Next week, they'll be going back down to the states. Back down to that small town they'd once been in and made plans and then just... disappeared. It had been an accident though. Noah didn't mean anything by it, he was just a baby. Literally hours old. But he was scared. It was a fear response.

It was also the day Peter learned that he can drag people into a teleport by grabbing them in a telekinetic hold, as he'd instinctively done to Gabe when he felt the child's sudden distress and pull.

Peter is pulled from his thoughts when a large hand rests on his shoulder. He looks up at the man looking down at him through ugly black frames. "Breakfast is ready. Noah wants his crayons back."

"Oh... right. Yeah. Of course." He tries to close the sketchbook before Gabe can see the crumbling New York skyline. The smoking wreckage of planes sticking out of two tall and shining towers.

Peter hates it. He hates that he draws these things and cannot intervene. That history must unfold exactly the same or else... Or else something, somewhere will screw up and too many butterflies will be crushed. Or the wrong ones saved. It's partly why they decided to move to Canada. Well, that and small town life wasn't meant for them, and it was too dangerous to live in New York where they may bump into their younger selves. Or worse... Company agents.

Gabe takes the sketchbook and sets it just inside the glass door as Peter packs away all of the crayons. He takes them inside with him and shows the boy that yes, dad brought them back for him, before joining the child at the table. Gabe slides in across from him after dishing out coffee and grub. It's... strange to Peter, how easily Gabe fell into the domesticity. Shades of a future yet to be conceived then unwritten present in the man before him. He remembered another time that never happened where the same man cut waffles for another blond haired boy named Noah. Perhaps, he thinks, his husband was always meant for this. Needed this in order to give him the motivation to keep his darker urges at bay. Certainly no one would believe him if he tried to tell them how strangely well suited the evil brain man was for fatherhood. They'd lock him up in something more secure than Level 5 and throw away the key.

"Dad?"

Peter frowned, then shook his head to clear his thoughts. "What?"

"Pass the syrup please dad."

"You okay?" Gabe asks him, frowning.

Peter smiles slowly, reaching for the bottle of maple syrup and passing it to the four year old. "Yeah," he says. "Just thinking."

"About what you saw this morning?"

"No. Something else. Something a hell of a lot happier."

Late that night, when the hellion was finally put to bed and stayed there, and beneath the cover of darkness Peter lay with his arms draped over Gabe's side in exhaustion, he doesn't expect the question that chases off a good post-sex snooze. "What's been bothering you today? You've been quiet... Quieter than usual."

"Nothing."

"Bullshit Peter."

He rolls his eyes and curses the day Gabe killed that woman for lie detection. "I've been thinking about what might have been. Once," he says and this time knows he doesn't ping the lie detector. "And how somehow, some way, fate has conspired to make it happen despite my changing the future."

"Which future?"

"The one where you still thought we were brothers. The one where I got..."

"My power."

"Yeah... That future was one hell of a trip..." They talk through the night. Peter telling him about a future that never was and a future self with a scar across his face. About his future self trying to assassinate Nathan, but in doing so screwed up the future he came from even worse than it was before. Because THEN it resulted in the formula getting out and just compounded the problem.

He tells him about a brown haired Claire working for Pinehurst and Arthur Petrelli. About watching himself get shot in the head, the last thing he'd been told was to find Sylar and get his power. It was the only way he'd be able to understand where the other Peter had gone wrong. The only way he would be able to see what he had to do. "And he was right about that. For the first time in all the madness going on around us, I had a certain clarity that I'd never had before. Everything was so..."

"Hyper Focused."

"...yeah... The you in that future didn't want to give me the power. Not until he realized that I was from the past. Even then he argued with me until I made him paint the future. After that... he made me fix his watch."

The body beneath him shifts and Peter moved aside to let him sit up. He could feel him looking at him, examining him even in the darkness. "You already had my power," his words are said softly before Peter felt a hand touch his cheek, the backs of fingers lightly brushing the skin. "You just didn't know how to use it."

"Maybe. We'll never know for sure now. That future is gone. The only place it exists is in my memory."

"And yet you said there's still parts of it that came true. They must have been rather important to have you caught up in them all day."

Peter reaches up to take his hand and brings it to his lips. "When I found you... future you I mean... he was living in Claire's old house in Costa Verde. He had this.. obnoxious blue apron with the presidential seal on it. Nathan, apparently, was the president if you'd believe it. Anyway, I'd never seen you in sweats until then." Gabe hums as Peter presses gentle kisses to his hand between sentences Then his voice lowers, and even with his enhanced senses Gabe has a little trouble hearing him. "He was making waffles for his son Noah that morning."

He doesn't say anything. He doesn't have to. With his other hand he pulls Peter close and holds him as they lay in the dark. Peter rests his head on Gabe's chest, listening to the steady rhythm of his heartbeat as Gabe strokes his hair. When Peter's breathing evens out and his grip goes slack with sleep at last, Gabe closes his eyes but he does not sleep. Instead, he listens to the steady breathing and the creak of floorboards from the apartment above them.

Gabe doesn't know what happened in that future that Peter, with his help, had averted by killing Arthur Petrelli. But having caused enough pain in the other man's life to know how to recognize grief in him gave him enough of a clue that it must have been something very hard for him to carry all this time alone. Something... terrible must have happened to his future self and his son. Otherwise his husband wouldn't be silently blaming himself for it even now.

Meeting Angela and Hiro on the side of the road near a gas station in a nearly empty town in the June heat, 1999 went about as well as Gabe had expected. After apologizing for freaking out and teleporting himself, his great uncle, and his great uncle's husband away further back into the past, Noah was actually quite excited to meet the ones he had left behind. He even apologized to Hiro for stealing his powers and gave him a gift to help his efforts at apology.

"My dads said you like comics! I like comics, too! This one's my favorite." He held a plastic bag with a comic book out to the former master of time and space.

Hiro accepted it and gave a bow to the young boy. "Thank you for your gift, Nathan Bennet."

The boy cocked his head in a manner that reminded Angela of Peter when he was a small boy himself. "Is that... what my name was before I was adopted?" He turns to Peter and Gabe with a frown. Peter sighs, but it's surprisingly Gabe that answers.

He nods. "It was. And we were going to tell you when you were older. But we had to call you something different because no one can ever know who you really are. Very dangerous people will be looking for you and your sister, do you understand?"

"Is that why my middle name is Nathaniel?"

"Yes, Noah. After your grandfather, my brother," Peter says, trying to keep the grief from his face. Even after all this time, the loss still stings.

Angela watches them with the boy and is quite surprised by how gentle Gabe is with him. How protective and caring he is. It does not change what she knows of him. It does not change the fact that she would rather kill him than let him near anyone she cares for... but it does remind her that just a few hours ago - from her perspective - this man had been willing to give up everything to help her protect her great grandchildren. Had been willing to part from Peter even if it meant keeping herself and Malina safe from anyone that might seek them out to harm them. Perhaps... in time... she might accept that there was some good in him. Provided whatever leash or muzzle Peter kept him on remained firmly in place.

If she only knew the truth of it she would be thanking Gabe instead for keeping a tight leash on her son and keeping HIS Hunger muzzled.

Malina is five and her brother, whom Angela reluctantly calls Noah if only for knowing that they kept Nathan in some form as his middle name, is nine when they meet at Level 5 in the Odessa, TX Primatech facility.

Angela had to call in a lot of favors, and dance through a lot of hoops to avoid getting caught by herself or her husband. But all she'd needed was to get Bob, Charles, Kaito, and Daniel to sign off on it. It had been quite easy really, since three had been with her since the beginning. The other... well... she and Kaito's history was rather complicated.

Peter wasn't surprised when his mother admitted to him that she didn't know for certain if he was Arthur or Kaito's son until his powers developed. Nothing surprised him about her anymore.

And despite no one even knowing about Sylar yet, Gabe still kept himself disguised at all times, not trusting that the suite Angela had built within the facility for their private use was private at all.

It was during this month of study and observation and power experimentation that they learned a terrible truth about the twins. Noah and his sister could touch without him stealing her ability. However... not for long. The sheer force generated by their combined powers was too strong. It was like trying to harness the power of the sun itself. It couldn't be done. At least, they didn't think so until one of the techs tried to separate them before they were sent hurtling towards opposite walls. The moment his hand landed on each child...

Malina screamed. Noah was too shocked to scream. And the man, the poor tech whose name had been Evan, was a pile of ash and bone.

The doors by the one way mirror opened. Hiro and Gabe ran in, grabbing their respective children and checking them over. Malina cried and Noah simply stared at the pile despite his father trying to get his attention. "I.... He.... He's dead."

"I know."

Tear brimmed eyes finally looked away, staring with fear at one of the only parents he ever knew. "We killed him."

"No, Noah. It was an accident."

"He's dead!" the boy shouts, trying to shove the man away. "He's dead! We killed him!" And when Gabe tries to restrain him, he can't. He tries, no doubt about that. The room is frozen, but despite having a deliberately deficient version of the same ability, he finds himself affected regardless, though he is still aware. It doesn't take him long to figure out why. The child unknowingly is using two powers at once.

It's Peter that breaks through the telekinetic hold and comes into the room, scooping the boy up into his arms and restarting time. "Ma wants to talk. You go. I've got him."

When Gabe gets around to the other side of the mirror, Angela is at a table with a file folder open. Her black hair streaked with grey and her age finally showing after all this time. To her side is a much younger Rene than he has ever seen him. And he can feel his body shift from his disguise to his normal appearance. The man says nothing, but gives a subtle nod in his direction.

"We need to make them forget this month."

"What? No. They're too young to go changing their memories."

"And let a nine year old boy and a five year old girl continue on knowing they've killed a man without even meaning to?"

"If we must. To go digging around in their minds now, at such a young age, can stunt their mental development."

"And what about their psychological? The guilt will eat them alive. They're too young to fully comprehend the consequences of being able to do what they do. You know I'm right."

"For the wrong reasons... but yes. But they will be told when they are old enough to handle it."

"Only if they learn of the event."

He only appears to agree as Rene gets up and leaves the room to deal with the children. Once he and Angela are alone, he turns his attention to the glass and looks, out, watching the Hatian do this magic trick. "He froze time and used telekinesis to hold me in place. He doesn't know he can do that."

"But we've tested him."

"It was a fear response. I think... if we work with him he will be able to use at least two powers at once. Three if we can find a way to kickstart the regeneration he took from his mother, but I would rather wait on that until he's at least old enough to buy his own beer. The last thing Peter and I need is an immortal ten year old angry because he's over forty and still needs his father to buy him his liquor." Just to be on the safe side, he reached out a hand towards his previously abandoned water, both relieved and satisfied when it slid across the table towards his hand. "Clearly I still have my power, and Peter likely does to. He can absorb them without stealing them away completely. We can help him develop this further alongside the power he took from Hiro."

She makes a note or two in her file before Peter comes back in, a sleeping child across his arms. He doesn't look happy, but he keeps his mouth shut lest he say something that will cause a larger rift between mother and son.

Noah is glued to his seat as he stares in fascination at the man on the television. It's just a political ad. They're on vacation in New York City. Because of this, his dads have to use their shape shifting power to look like other people. He hates it, but over the years he's gotten used to it. He had to, really. It was to keep him safe.

He was 11 and the year was 2006 the first time he ever saw his biological grandfather's face on a hotel television.

"You don't look anything alike," he says when Peter, in his normal face, comes out of the bathroom a few moments later.

His dad's eyes glance at the TV before he quickly looks away again. "You're right. He looks more like our uncle Jim. Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if he was Jim's. Ma wasn't exactly the most loyal wife."

Noah laughs as the political ad ends, proclaiming that everyone should 'VOTE PETRELLI!' "You REALLY don't like Grandma do you?"

Peter shakes his head and sits on the end of the hotel bed. "She's my mother and I love her. But the older I get the more I find I can't stand her and the games she plays with people's lives. One day you'll be old enough to understand. Now go get washed up. We're meeting your father for dinner in an hour and we can't just teleport in at the last minute." As he watches Noah get up and head for the bathroom, he notices the boy walks a little slowly, like he's dragging his feet and reluctant to end the conversation. Peter frowns.

Later that night, in the bed next to their own in the little rented room, Noah thrashes around in a fit in his sleep. "We killed him!"

Before Peter can even get up out of bed Gabe is right there at his side, pulling the eleven year old into his lap and pressing his face against his shoulder like he often did when the child had nightmares when he was much smaller. "It's okay Noah. We're here. It's going to be okay," Peter hears whispered in the dim light of the desk lamp across the room. It's nights like this that Peter's reminded why his love for his mother is coupled so often with loathing. His son wasn't a science experiment. His son wasn't some shiny new toy to be poked and prodded until he broke.

His anger simmered just under the surface. He couldn't stay here, even though it was where he was needed most. As Gabe continued to comfort Noah, Peter got up and went to their suitcase, digging around for a clean change of clothes. When he came out of the bathroom, Gabe was waiting for him outside the door, Noah once more soundly asleep in his own bed.

"I need to go... for a while. Clear my head."

"Peter, I know that look."

"He thinks we're on vacation, Gabe. I can't... I can't keep doing this to him. I don't think I can keep lying to his face. I know we need to know how their power works together, and I know it's too dangerous for us to copy it from them but they're children. They're not-"

"I know. But you are not going to your mother - either version of her - and you are not going to take your anger out on her no matter how much I agree with you. If Noah wasn't here I'd already have you too distracted to let it get this far."

"I'm not-"

"But you want to. You want to know what the hell that woman is thinking. You want to dig in and have a look. Believe me, right now I'd like nothing better than to crack her skull open and have a look myself. But if you go out that door and there's a murder tonight you had better make sure you deal with it on your own because I will NOT let this monster we have between us anywhere near that child."

Peter's body tenses. That is exactly what he had wanted to do. Fuck the future. Fuck the end of the world. His son was suffering and it was only a matter of time before his latent regen ability would break through the memory wipes completely instead of bringing them to the surface as nightmares. He wanted to end it. To protect him. Even if it meant matricide. Failing that... he could feel them. The city teeming with people and life and so many delicious specials flitting too and fro with newly awakened abilities and-

-SLAP-

"Snap out of it." The voice is low, almost predatory. He looks back up into the face of the man looming over him. "If I can control it, so can you. And you WILL Peter. So help me if you go out that door and kill tonight... Forget the kid. We promised each other. We made a solemn vow before God himself and I will put you in the ground if I have to." His hand is taken into a larger one. The cold metal of the golden ring that's never left his hand since the night it was slipped on is heavy against his skin. The constant reminder of that and other vows made that night.

Peter wasn't being faceteus when he told Angela they'd literally had it in their wedding vows to kill each other if they lost control.

His rage abates, if only temporarily, in the face of a bigger threat. A more powerful and dangerous and experienced predator. But it still bubbles just below the surface. He nods. "But I can't stay here right now. I need to clear my head."

"If you don't call in an hour-"

"Then you'll know to take Noah somewhere safe before you come hunting."

The kiss Gabe presses to his lips is flavored with desperation and the other man's own seething anger. Teeth sink into the soft, disfigured flesh of Peter's lower lip and there's the coppery taste of blood flooding his mouth before the kiss is broken and his lip heals itself. "I had better get that call," Gabe whispers between them, their foreheads now pressed together.

"I will try to control myself tonight."

Gabe does not sleep the rest of the night. When an hour goes by without a word, his gut twists in knots as he prepares himself mentally for the worst. Five minutes pass. Then ten. And Gabe cannot stall any longer. Just as he was pulling on his socks, his phone rings.

"Peter?"

"Sorry." It's hard to hear him. There's too much wind. He must be on a roof somewhere. Gabe sighs in relief.

"Where are you? You haven't-"

"Went flying. Forgot this was... forgot this was around the time Nathan..."

"Peter?"

"This was the night of Nathan's crash. When he flew and Heidi-"

"Where are you, Peter?"

Silence.

"I'm coming to get you."

"No. No I'm fine. I haven't hurt anyone. I just, I was flying. Just flying. You know it helps me clear my head. Get perspective." Gabe hears him sigh. "I'm on the bridge. The ambulance just left. I... I saw it happen and I couldn't- I couldn't just watch."

Gabe rubs his temple as he pieces together what Peter is trying to say. "Did Nathan see you, I mean, did he see his brother at the bridge after the accident? You know I can't just remember his memories anymore. You didn't change anything did you?"

"No. I used a different face. I'm not an idiot! But I couldn't just float there and watch!"

"Alright, Peter. Just... come back now. Get some sleep."

There's silence on the other end of the line and for a few tense moments he thinks Peter's hung up. Finally, finally he can feel himself breathing again when he hears Peter's voice, quiet and tired from the bathroom doorway. "Hey."

The Mitchell-Graymalkins leave back for Montreal a few days later after one hell of a screaming match between Peter and his mother in the secure testing facility they'd commandeered this time for their experimentation.

Angela Petrelli, the older future version of her sighs as the powerless Hiro puts a cup of hot tea on the table before joining her. "I agree with Gabriel and Peter. We know all that we can about their combined power now. The testing is doing more harm to the children than good. We must stop until they are old enough to understand."

"We are running out of time."

"All we can do now is train them to the best of our ability and hope that when the day comes, they are strong enough to do what is needed of them."

Angela doesn't like it, but she doesn't have to. She only has to agree.

On the night of November 8th, 2006 Noah was at a friend's house spending the night so his dads could have some time to themselves for a change. It helped that the mother of Noah's friend was like them, though she didn't know there were others like her in the world and they weren't inclined on outing themselves. Her's was a passive ability anyway that allowed her to soothe animals. It helped her with her work as a veterinary tech. Regardless, because of this they thought it alright to let him stay over. If he had a... accident with his powers, his friend's mom would be more likely not to freak out entirely.

While Noah was enjoying a night of movies and board games, Peter and Gabe sat invisible on a rooftop in New York City with shit wine and pizza. They were waiting for the fireworks over Kirby Plaza.

Watching the event from this perspective they were reminded how far they had come from that night so long ago, yet only recently passed once again, at Union Wells High School. As the Peter of the past exploded high above, the two immortal men clinked their bottles together. "To the past," Peter says sarcastically.

"If we sit here long enough we might get to see them drag your brother's burnt carcass into an ambulance."

Peter sighed and rubbed his temple as if staving off a headache. "And for that, you can jerk your own cock tonight."

"Oh come on! Peter!" But Peter ignored him, taking half of what was left of the pizza and moving to the other end of the roof. "Peter!"

Sure enough, when they went back home, Gabe was locked out of the bedroom and left to his own devices for the rest of the night. It didn't matter that no simple door knob lock could keep him out, but he'd learned long ago behind the wall that when Peter was in a strop, it was best to leave him be lest he get hit repeatedly in the face with whatever large, heavy object was at hand. And as fun as a large, almost threatening looking neon green object in their nightstand could occasionally be, he really didn't want to have to deal with the embarassment - even if only he and Peter would know about it - of getting bludgeoned to temporary death with a sex aid.

That December, Peter gets a generic birthday card in the mail. In it is a gift card for a chain of stores exclusive to Switzerland.

Gabe laughs as Noah takes the card, deciding for himself that he's going to get on the family computer and see if he can find an online store somewhere to use the card with.

"Glad to know some things haven't changed. Your mother is as petty as ever."

"At least Hiro and Malina signed the card, too," Peter said as he put it on the mantle of their fake fireplace amidst the numerous Christmas decorations Noah had insisted had to clutter the place up every year.

"Hey pops?! What's the exchange rate between us and Switzerland? I want to order a bunch of cow bells."

"No cowbells!"

"Yes cowbells!"

"No! Not after last Halloween!"

"More cowbells it is then," Gabe said with a smug grin as Peter shot him a dirty look.

Malina loved her new cowbells when they arrived in late January of 2007.

Hiro didn't dare laugh where the old woman could hear him. But he knew she'd think twice about sending Peter such an insulting gift for his next birthday. He kept the cowbell that Malina had so graciously given to him on the nightstand in his room, and used it every time Angela said something that annoyed him. At least, he did for a month and a half before the woman threatened to take his sword and shove it where the sun doesn't shine.

In March Noah frowned as he read the paper his dads had left out.

It wasn't even local, but from some place in Texas. Odessa or some other podunk backwater in America.

"You've got questions," he hears his dad say.

"Are we... are we time travelers?"

"That's a pretty loaded question for an eleven year old."

"But I'm not a normal eleven year old."

"You're right." Peter smirks and puts on his best impression of Hagrid from those Harry Potter movies. "Yer a wizard, Noah!"

"Daaaaad!" But it gets him to crack a smile. A smile that fades when his young eyes land on the newspaper again. On the picture of his dad next to his brother Nathan. Even though he knows his dad was at work all that day. "Are we?"

Peter moves to sit at the table, indicating for Noah to join him. "It's long past time to tell you the truth, kiddo."

And so Peter starts telling him his story. Nathan's story. Claire's story. And... Gabe's. By the end of it, Gabe has come home from work and joined them, silently supplying drinks and food for them when he does. Noah's disbelieving at first, especially when Peter tells him how he and Gabe first met, and how Peter met Noah's mother that same night. The boy shuts himself in his room afterward. He refuses to come out. They know when he leaves, and they know when he comes back.

The next morning he doesn't look at them as he gets ready for school. He is silent the entire drive until Gabe parks the car at the curb to let him out in front of the building. "Are you going to be okay, Noah?"

The boy wipes at his nose and gives a silent nod.

Later that day, Peter is called to come pick him up from school and is told he's suspended for a week for fighting.

Noah still won't talk to either of them but he at least is willing to sit at the table and eat dinner.

He hasn't spoken more than a couple of stock phrases to either of them in a week, not for lack of them trying to get him to open up to them. Finally, after dinner on Sunday he offers to help Gabe with the dishes. Peter retreats to the sitting room, flipping through some old medical journals he'd subscribed to but hadn't had the time to really enjoy reading.

He's moved from reading to jotting down notes about a new treatment for alzheimer's for him to look into later when the wind is knocked out of him and he's got a lap full of a teary eyed eleven year old. The pen, paper, and magazine are gently taken from him and when he looks up, his husband is looking at him with a closed, serious expression. Peter frowns. Gabe nods before slipping from the room.

After Peter has put their son to bed that night he seeks out Gabe, finding him on the balcony.

"What's wrong?"

"He has it." Gabe takes off his glasses and rubs at his eyes. "God, Peter... He's been so freaked out all week. Ever since he found out the truth about us. About himself..."

"Where did he go that night?"

"You don't want to know."

"Tell me. Tell me now."

Gabe shakes his head and leans against the rail. "He went to the park because he didn't want to hurt us. He was angry and felt like we'd betrayed him and I don't blame him for feeling that way. But he didn't want to just hurt us, Peter. The way he... detailed it to me. He was so detached and objective about it. As if he really put a lot of thought into it. He's been... considering his options for some time."

"Dear God... How long?"

"The last memory wipe didn't fully take. When he realized he was missing time, he unconsciously tapped into the regen ability and restored his memories of the testing. All of the testing."

"Why didn't he say anything?"

"He was scared, Peter. I warned Angela this would happen." He stands up straight, turning his back to the world beyond their balcony. "I warned her he would remember. And now we have an angry, scared child with powers he doesn't fully comprehend who has legitimately thought about murdering us in our sleep just to see what the hell we were thinking. The way we redirect won't work for him."

"Then we find something that will."

Peter comes home late from work a few weeks later with a box of broken junk and different tool kits. "Starting tomorrow, you're going to work on the weekends with you father. He's going to teach you how to keep your mind and hands busy. The rest of the week, after you've finished your homework, we'll sit down and show you how to fix everything in this box. No instructions. No owners manuals or books."

After two months of this, Noah's decided he wants to fix computers after he gets frustrated and breaks their old one when his game freezes. When he fixes it, it's better than it had ever been and runs like an entirely new, entirely more efficient machine. And it was.

He's so proud of what he's done he tells anyone that will listen.

When Peter comes home to find him attempting to build a miniature nuclear reactor in his bedroom, however, is where the line was drawn in the sand of what is and is not acceptable in Noah's construction experiments.

It didn't help that Gabe had been caught red handed helping him build it.

Things are... quiet for a while.

They both know that right now, and for the next year, their other selves are dealing with the consequences of the Shanti Virus, the attempted assasination of Nathan, and the man's skyrocketing career in the Senate.

Peter continues to draw the future in his sketchbooks, unerringly predicting events that for them have long past but for the world are yet to come. Some they knew about but others... not so much.

They spend this time that Pinehurst and Arthur Petrelli are working in the shadows to move house, claiming it's because Peter got a better job but really they need a larger place. A basement in which to train their son. Extra rooms to convert into workspaces to help keep the boy busy. Help keep the power they never meant to give him at bay.

It's a lovely home and much larger than their apartment in Montreal. Peter likes it because it looks modern and Gabe likes it because the outside at least looks like it's trying to pretend to be a log cabin. Noah likes the size of the place. He likes that his room is bigger and that there's plenty of room for his projects and his books. He hopes they'll be living there long enough to see it snow. He'd love to use a real fireplace for Christmas. And he already has plans for the large rocks out front around Halloween. And the front and side porches were so.... open and huge and he couldn't wait to see them lined with lights or pumpkins or maybe even both at once. After all, he never knew when he'd get another chance to go all out for a holiday again.

A birthday card for Peter arrives that December to their new address, indicating that yes his mother knew exactly where they had run off to.

Two years they wait for the news that Pinehurst has been burned to the ground. Another section of Peter's sketchbook gets a large black mark across each page from corner to corner before they turn to the next.

The first in the series Peter likes to call "Nathan's Huge Fuck-Up Part 2" is his brother in his favorite suit jacket and tie. A flag pin on his lapel. The colored pencil drawing is of remarkable quality, and captures the expression Gabe only vaguely recalls Nathan had worn that night in the limousine. In the corner of the drawing is a blue check mark - the sign that Gabe could at least somewhat remember the memory of whatever it might have been with Nathan in it. A sign that this is what will happen because it already had happened. Pages with a red X in the corner were things neither man had seen or known. It was an entire elaborate color coded system of marks that needed no explanation from them to each other. Peter had used a similar system when he was studying back in high school, though then the colors were for which class the material belonged to.

They know that soon, they may need to cut and run. For neither of them knew how far Danko's reach truly ran with Nathan's political power behind him. Sure, they might be safe in Canada... but there was no guarantee. Especially when Nathan's political power extended to Homeland Security.

Noah is 14 when, in 2009, Peter comes and wakes him up in the night. He doesn't tell him why, only that he needs to pack a bag with anything he thinks is most important and a few clothes. Break his phone. Brick his computers. Noah knows not to ask questions when he comes downstairs with a single bag hanging off his shoulder.

When he looks around the room he finds that any pictures that had any of the three of them in it are gone. There's a fire going in the fireplace and it's June. He can see the cover of one of his dad's sketchbooks in the fire.

Without a word he takes Peter's hand, then Gabe's in his other.

Just as the three of them had left, one bag each, the doors are kicked in and the windows smashed. A man in a suit and horn rimmed glasses steps over the debris after receiving the all clear.

One of the strike team finds a drawing carved into the top of a wooden table in the dining room.

Bennet notes it's pretty impressive for having been done with the bent salad fork sticking out of the wood to the side. There, in pale, freshly carved lines against a dark finish is himself, just as he stepped into the home. "Any trace of the target?"

"Three phones smashed to pieces. Two laptops with the harddrives ripped out. Same with a desktop in one of the bedrooms," reports one of the men.

"Photographs, forensics, everything. Bag and tag anything that isn't nailed down. And someone get a picture of this carving!"

"What the hell were you thinking!?"

"I can't just sit here and do nothing!"

"That's exactly what you'll do! We cannot interfere with the past!"

"Like you're one to talk! How many times did you jump back and forth across time and royally fuck it up!?"

It's the first of only two times in his life that Gabe will ever strike Noah. The boy put a hand to his face, his mother's eyes glaring at the man he, until now, happily called his father. Peter was so shocked that his next reply in their screaming match died in his throat. "Gabe..." he started warningly, but the man stared down the mouthy, rebellious teenager instead. "Do you even comprehend what you nearly cost us?"

"People like us are dying!"

"Don't you think we know that? We LIVED it."

"Then you know what can be changed! What can't! You can make it better!"

"I woke up this morning without the ability to microwave things across the room from me. Now? Now I remember killing a boy just like you in an abandoned diner where I discovered the truth about where I came from! It was one of the worst days of my life and because you had to contact Rebel with scans from your dad's sketchbook I now have more blood on my hands and I only know the difference because it's damn difficult to alter the memories of a Regen!"

"I didn't know..."

"You're damn right you didn't know!" Gabe roared. "His name was Luke. Luke Campbell! Until I got my life straightened out with Peter he was the only person who I counted a friend and now, because you couldn't fucking help yourself, I have to live with the fact that the timeline has changed and I killed him!"

"I'm sorry!"

"His blood is on BOTH our hands, Noah!"

"I.... I can fix it! If I go back to last month I can-"

He's silenced when Peter pulls him in close, keeping the boy from getting hysterical if only to protect themselves and their safe house from damage and discovery if the teen loses control. He held the teenage boy tight, stroking his hair and holding his head to his shoulder. Gabe stormed off, the door slamming behind him and causing both dad and son to flinch from the sound. "Consider this the hard lesson in using your powers. A lesson that I learned by watching a different version of myself make a similar mistake. He came to the past to kill your grandfather and prevent the world from knowing about us. So he shot Nathan and actually did kill him. When he returned to the future, it was worse. Not only did people know about our kind but there was a formula that gave people abilities. Because there were so many people with abilities, a man in that future was able to harness all of their power and destroy the world by shattering the crust of the Earth. He came back again to bring Nathan back to life but it did not fix what he damaged. He tried again and again to make small changes to fix what he had done and it only made things worse. In the end, he died in his screwed up future, leaving me to clean up his mess."

"Did you... did you fix it?"

"No."

Noah's voice is nervous when he asks, "What did you do?"

"I aborted the timeline entirely and turned your father back into a killer. He had changed, Noah. Sure his change at the time was based on lies and deceit by those he had learned to trust, but he was a better man. He had learned to control his destructive power and had even managed to get something close to a normal life. And I wrecked it all. I went to his house, coerced him into giving me his power even though he did not want to condemn me to it, and after his son was killed because of the trouble I brought into his home, he blew up like a nuclear bomb and killed himself and leveled a city. The only survivors were myself and a twisted version of your mother."

"Oh God... Does... did you tell him?"

"Eventually, yes. But not for many years. You were four. And when I got back I did everything I could to make sure that future would never happen. Instead what we got, depending on who you were, was far worse. And now, you have been forced to learn this lesson the hard way as well. Be glad it only caused one death and not hundreds."

Gabe didn't come back for a few weeks. When he did he was mentally exhausted and had a headache. Something he never, ever got.

Peter later learned why.

"Luke's alive again," Gabe said after he'd been back at their safe house but silent for nearly four days. "I hit a lot harder than I expected."

"You didn't-"

"All you need to know is that at some point, you're going to suddenly remember a blond teenager being dropped in your lap with a head wound and a beer bottle sticking out of a kidney and me shouting at you to fix it and make it better. He's alive, you're a surprisingly good emergency surgeon, and I'm very sorry for ruining your favorite area rug in the apartment in Brooklyn."

Gabe knew when the memory finally caught up with Peter as the slightly altered timeline correction settled because he looked up from a card game with Noah to see a fist flying into his face and Peter shouting at the boy "Go to your room and whatever you hear do NOT come out until tomorrow!"

When Noah did eventually come out of his room, he noticed there was a new area rug under the crappy folding table that also wasn't there the day before. The old table was in a pile in the corner. "Kinding," Gabe had muttered as he set breakfast in front of the teen. "Who knows how long we may be here. Might need it come winter."

Noah only nodded as Peter hummed, sipping his coffee as he went through his sketchbook with a fat black marker in silence.

Noah would never forget the day he first laid eyes on his mother in the flesh.

It was... strange. But at the same time comforting in a way that his dads tried but could never quite get right. But he appreciated it all the same.

He hadn't intended to teleport. It's just... his dads had pushed him pretty hard all week with his training, and working on his GED while easy for him, was frustrating because it was so easy. It felt like he was wasting his time, but his parents agreed that if he and his sister were successful in their mission to save not just humanity, but all life on the planet, then he'd need an education for life beyond the H.E.L.E.

He just wanted to get away for awhile. Have some breathing space and to think. He made sure not to travel in time, but...

Well... His parents DID say he was supposed to work on getting an education.

He went on the campus tour, hanging towards the back and making a couple of snide comments here and there under his breath. After all, he was younger than the others there by a few years at least. Apparently, lunch was included on the tour, and it wasn't hard for him to slip by as part of the crowd.

He was seated by himself, close to but not quite part of the group of prospective students when a tray was set down and a chair scraped the floor next to him. "I honestly don't know why I even bothered."

Noah blinked and turned to her in surprise. "Excuse me?"

"Have you ever just wanted to bail on something so badly but you know if you do you'll have like, a hundred secret service guys hounding you just because you wanted to skip out and get a burger instead of... whatever pretentious stuff this is?"

"Not... Not really?"

She smiled at him, a little embarrassed but then seemed to take it in stride. "You're pretty young to be looking at colleges already."

"Child prodigy," he replied. "My dads think I'm some kind of super genius. I mean, I am, but that doesn't mean I want to spend the rest of my life in school. They didn't and they turned out... mostly fine."

Her laugh wasn't something he ever expected to hear. It was... it was something that seemed to reach deep into the darkest corners of his soul and pull him back out, shining a light into every shadow and banishing every doubt. Or maybe he was just euphoric from actually meeting his mother. Alive and breathing and smiling at him even though she had no idea who he was. "At least yours let you come alone. Mine... let's just say one dad thinks I need to live in a plastic bubble and the other one sent Agents Smith and Smith over there hiding not-so-inconspicuously in the corner. I mean come on, if you're going to send secret service you might as well send the ones that don't care if they're seen."

"Are you famous or something?" he asked, genuinely curious what her answer, even if it's a lie, might be.

"No way. But my dad, my real dad I mean, is a US Senator. Not that I even care. I only wanted to come to DC just to be close to both my dads- my adopted one works here, too. They're not together or anything." Then, realizing what she'd just said and something the boy she'd plopped herself down next to had said earlier in the conversation... "Oh God, not that it's a bad thing. I mean it's just-"

"If I wasn't so disgustingly Canadian I'd probably be offended. It's your lucky day, senator girl. You could probably mug me and I'd be apologizing to you for it."

She nearly chokes on her lemonade. "If we both end up going here, you're so hanging out with me."

"Your overprotective dads don't do background checks or anything on literally everyone you meet, do they?"

"My dad is a US Senator, what do you think?"

"So I should probably tell my dads to hide the bodies before you come visit for Christmas then. Good to know." She thinks he's being funny. She laughs.

The annoying tour guide tries to get everyone's attention. He leans a bit closer and turns so secret service boys can't see his mouth moving. "Word to the wise, senator girl. Show up long enough to hear the elevator pitch and get the free food. Grab a few brochures and then you're good to go. Free food and you can tell your dads the highlights after you run around DC getting into all sorts of trouble."

"Are you sure you're a super genius?"

"You don't get big brains like these just by sitting around all day reading books," he says before he turns back to his tray to scarf down half the cafeteria pizza he'd grabbed and chased it down with the bottled water he'd snatched with it.

When Claire went to look for him again later in the crowd, she was a little disappointed when she couldn't find him. But she remembered his advice for the next four colleges her grandmother insisted she visit as a way to keep her out of whatever it was Nathan was orchestrating this time.

As for Noah... when he got back home he was ready for trouble from his dads. But... none came. He wouldn't know that it was because Peter had gone looking for him, eventually finding him and following him around while safely invisible.

After meeting his mother, Noah was determined to push himself harder. Not just break his limits but shatter them. He would master every last ability in his arsenal and he would be ready for whatever war was yet to come.

He learned to maximize the power behind different abilities by sort of shutting off others. Finding new ways to utilize them through improvisation and refining any technique or method he devised. Hiro had even come for a time, Noah believing the best way to learn how to use a sword was from someone who had to learn from an actual samurai. Well... Adam Monroe wasn't exactly an actual samurai, but he was the closest Hiro could get at the time.

Hiro's visit was also two-fold. He could tell Noah all about his sister and how her life was going. And Hiro could learn all about what Noah was doing and what he was like, taking that information and news back home with him to share with her.

Malina had sent him a cowbell and a picture of herself from her last birthday.

Noah sent back a picture of himself holding his GED testing results and a rare blue butterfly under glass, having learned from Hiro that she liked the winged menaces.

"And tell her, when you can sit with her alone, that mom's nose wrinkles when she laughs, and she has this little snort that she can't stop when she thinks something is really funny."

"You met Claire?"

Noah nods. "By accident. I... teleported without focusing and was really stressed out at the time. I didn't tell her anything about the past... er... future. She never even knew my name. But she was really nice and really didn't like that her dads were so protective."

Hiro chuckles and gives a nod. "Now THAT sounds like the cheerleader I knew. I will be sure to tell Malina your message."

They have moved again. Carbondale, Indiana. A small town. No specials in the area that Gabe and Peter can sense. A new place, a new face for each of his parents, and a new name to memorize.

"Why do I have to be Oliver? Do I look like an Oliver to you?!"

"It's not my fault you're going to steal your own identity next January!"

Noah puts in his earbuds and sighs before leaving the latest house they've rented.

He'd just had his fifteenth birthday on the 13th. In a few days time Sylar will kill Senator Nathan Petrelli in Washington DC. He will then be forced to take over the senator's life and identity for a period of approximately four, maybe five months.

This will be the first time he and his dads have lived in America since they traveled in time fifteen years ago.

Noah finds his way to an ice cream shop. The local high school has let out and so others his own age are hurrying to their after school jobs, or to whatever place they usually go hang out with their friends. Noah finds a nice table in the corner to sit and watch as he lazily picks at his mint chocolate chip and cookie dough banana split.

It's here that Peter finds him later, wearing his latest stolen face. "Hey."

"Hey."

"Your father's making goulash."

"Ugh."

"I know. I think I saw a pizza place a few blocks back towards the house if you're not full up on ice cream yet?"

"I think I'll pass."

It's the same with every new town they move to. A new name. A new face. A new house. A new excuse why he doesn't go to the local school. Why he doesn't make friends.

"We're probably going to be here a while," Peter says to him on the walk back. "You could pretend you don't already have your GED and go be normal for a while."

"Too much trouble. Besides, kids my age are really dumb. Like... really really dumb."

"Suit yourself. But you deserve a break. I don't think we can be any more ready than we are now."

"There's always a power out there I don't have yet. I can't master what i don't have. What if I need it? What if it makes all the difference between life and death?"

"Noah, we've talked about this. Ability addiction-"

"I know. I know. It'll cause my power to go into overdrive like great-grandpa's and start stealing instead of mimicking."

"Don't forget you're still a fifteen year old kid. Despite the weight on your shoulders you still have every right to want the same things every other fifteen year old wants and needs."

It's weird, knowing the truth about something and then watching the lie unfold on live television.

Gabe tilts his head some with a slight frown of concentration. "You look good in a suit."

"I'm at a funeral," Peter says ignoring the state funeral on TV for the late Senator Nathan Petrelli. "Jesus, Gabe. Seriously, do you know how disturbing it is to see you leering at me on the TV like this?"

Over the years as his parents had mellowed, the Forbidden Name and Forbidden Days became less Forbidden and closer to just uncomfortable. Though American Thanksgiving was still on the list of things to never even consider bringing up.

"Yeah..." Noah says from where he's stretched out on the floor watching the TV. "I mean, do you know how creepy you look right now? You've got the real thing sitting not three feet from you and you're still being a weird perv?"

Peter laughs as Gabe throws a couch pillow at the boy. "What? So I can't appreciate a good looking man in a good suit?"

"I only ever wore that thing to funerals!"

"Still a handsome man in a good suit."

"You're unbelievable. I swear to God, Gabe-"

"Wait... is this why you tried to pirate a Texas broadcast signal a few years ago? To see dad on TV?"

Peter turns his full attention to his husband with a raised brow. "Really?"

"Yeah. Was I not supposed to tell him that?" Noah asked in false innocence before turning his attention back to the TV. Sure, it was a sad day. The day Nathan Petrelli would finally be buried. And yes, the teen knew the truth of what happened. His parents didn't hold anything back when they'd come clean with him about their past and his own. But he also got to see his mother in the crowd of mourners. He got to see part of his own family history unfold in front of him on live national television.

He could hear them bicker-banter back and forth behind him, but years of practice taught him to tune it out as he watched the sad, sorrowful face of his mother as she clung to his great uncle for support. In a weird way, he found her beautiful, even in the wake of tragedy. Not for the first time he cursed the fact that she was such an integral part of the events that led to his birth. How he so wanted to find her and just tell her all about him and about his sister Malina and how much he misses her and...

And his regret for being born at the cost of her life.

Had he not taken her power, she would have survived.

Then again... had she lived, he had no doubt that the world would be doomed to die.

On December 7th, 2010, the Mitchel-Graymalkins, currently going by Berkowitz, celebrated a birthday. And a weird anniversary or sorts.

His dads even let him have a glass of wine with dinner this year.

Which he immediately spat out like it was some kind of horrid, offensive death liquid. "That tastes like crap! Why in the name of all that is holy would you two idiots drink this?!"

Gabe laughs with Peter before they launch into how, exactly, things in the World Behind The Wall worked. Noah stared at them like they were the dumbest people on Earth. Compared to him, they quite possibly might have been. "How is it that all those years growing up in the lap of luxury not once did you drink a decent wine?! At least a good champagne! And you!" He whirled on Gabe. "What's your excuse? You had my grandfather's memories rattling about in there still, even without his consciousness to guide them. And you're telling me that not a single one bled over?"

"There was the Peter Pan statue in the park. It was there before you ever turned up."

Peter's expression changes to one of triumph. "I knew it! Remind me sometime to go to New York as my past self in 2011 sometime and collect some money from Claire. I TOLD her that the statue I saw in your nightmare park was Nathan trying to get through!"

"You did not."

"I did so. She owes me forty dollars!"

"And what kind of college student has that kind of money on her, Peter? Let alone in her bank account-" And on they go. Back and forth before somehow getting on a story of another time during their sojourn in the nightmare land that had brought them closer together. Peter and a sledgehammer. And a book.

Noah tunes them out again as he gets up from his chair and clears the table while the two falsely argue over one thing or another. He refills their glasses with the crap wine Peter had bought that morning and retires to his room. He sits down at his desk, covered in computer parts and papers and delicate tools. He fiddles with some wires idly before tossing them back down to the desktop.

Finally, he pulls out a box from under his bed and began to dig. Two piles of comics later, he finally finds what he's looking for, pulling the small bundle out from the bottom of the box and climbing into bed.

Sifting through the different issues, he puts them in order... not necessarily by issue number but certainly chronological.

He nearly has them all, save issue 31. Supposedly there were two versions and rather than try to figure out which one came first, the publisher simply made both and sent them out for sale. At least, that's what the rumours surrounding the mysterious comic claimed. For now, though, Noah pulled out one of his favorites. The date, and what he knew was already happening in Central Park right at that moment, it seemed appropriate.

He pulled the comic from the plastic and ran a finger down the cover. A blond girl standing and staring up at a carnival poster of herself in a cheerleading uniform. "The Undying Girl" the title of the issue proclaimed when he opened to the first page, taking no note of how foxed the edges of the pages were from the many times he'd sat and read it since he bought it.

When he had finished the last page, stylized versions of his dads in the last panel with proclaiming it was a brave new world, he turned his attention to the window.

"No, it's really not," he says to himself, recalling what Peter told him when he told him the Truth. Rebel had covered it up. All but one that managed to slip by. "There's a little time yet."

Noah was filling out a job application on December 8, 2011. It was for a local computer repair shop. He'd already proven his skills and shown them his GED certificate as proof that he had actually finished at least the equivalent of high school. The manager of the chain store took one look at his application and looked to his equally incompetent assistant manager. "Dude, he's Canadian."

"What does my being Canadian have to do with anything?"

"Everyone knows Canadian's can't lie." Noah stares at him for the longest moment before he realizes the slightly glazed look in the man's eye. Oh dear God, the guys were stoned. He could work with this.

By the time he'd made it back home, their TV was destroyed and Gabe wasn't home, despite it being his day off from the garage.

"He forgot today was the day your mother screwed everyone over," Peter had said in answer to the unasked question. "Don't bother fixing it. The news over the next year's going to really piss him off and it's just not worth it."

"I kind of like watching TV though."

"Do you like watching TV enough to fix the thing once a week? Trust me, it'll only get worse from here. Best to avoid it entirely."

In mid 2012, just after Noah's seventeenth birthday, he storms into the house and slams the door behind him. "That stupid-" and he lapses into, of all odd languages, Vulcan. Peter is quite impressed. He had the boy pegged for Klingon or Elvish.

"What happened?"

"I was fired! Me! Fired!"

"What for?"

"Well let's just start with the fact that my mother is an idiot! How selfish do you have to be to out an entire subspecies because you don't feel like you're special enough?! In what timeline did she honestly think this was a good idea!"

"Okay... So what were you caught doing?"

Noah mumbles under his breath.

"Come again, I didn't quite hear that."

Noah mumbles again.

"I don't think your father heard you from the hallway where he's hiding because he doesn't know if you're going to explode or not."

"I said my drink was cold so I... I microwaved it. With my hands."

"You were fired for reheating cold coffee?"

"No. I ended up setting off a customer's pacemaker."

At this Gabe chokes on the donut he'd been eating in the hallway.

"He's alive, I swear! It was an accident! But apparently having an Evo on staff is a liability! Are you kidding me?! Aaron and Loni are stoned off their asses all the time! I'm always having to go behind them and fix their work because they're almost as brainless as my mother!"

It takes another two months before Noah is over losing his job. mostly because he can't get another one in town. Word spreads fast when it's about an Evo. "Oliver" and "Jonas" start getting odd looks in town, since everyone knows everyone and the weird Canadians all came to town together...

They pay their last month's rent that November, pack up their lives again, and leave without a trace.

In December, the new tenants will receive a birthday card on the 23rd. The significance of the gift card inside is lost to them as the card is tossed but the gift card is kept.

Angela and Hiro cannot find the wayward family.

They've become one of two roving Evo clinics going around the country.

On June 13, 2014 Peter, Gabe, and Noah spend the day watching the chaos unfold on television.

He doesn't feel much like celebrating his 19th birthday.

On this day, the countdown begins to the end of the world. The countdown begins to Noah and Malina's destiny.

"Thank God! I can be myself again!" Gabe exclaims on the fifteenth as Peter digs up a box in the New Mexico desert.

"You haven't been yourself since 2006 the first time around," Peter tosses over his shoulder with a shovel full of dirt and sand.

Noah rolls his eyes as he keeps feeding papers and documents, all falsified, into a fire boredly. It's the same with each new identity they take on. Find a remote location, purge the old, and retrieve the new. Only in this case they were digging up the past. Ready to hide in plain sight again. Take over the lives of their past selves. The mobile clinic had already been passed to another couple of Evo medics who needed to hide and lay low for a while themselves.

Finally, Peter the sound of metal slamming into metal rang up from an eight foot deep hole. Soon after, the shovel was thrown out, causing Noah to have to duck out of the way or be decapitated. The large metal box was next, landing with a thud centimeters from Gabe's feet. "Are you deliberately aiming at us or is this some deep rooted and subconscious resentment coming out Peter?" when the man himself came out of the hole at last.

"I love you too Gabe. Now come on. The sooner we crack this box open the sooner we can get back to our lives."

"And what about me? My shit's not in that box. I'm supposed to be a few days old!"

Gabe smirked and held up a plastic bag with a Canadian passport, an ID card with a blank spot where the photo should be, and other miscellaneous identification. "Ian Graymalkin has a younger brother."

Noah's eyes widened. There was no way they could have thought THAT far ahead. Even if Peter had drawn it, they couldn't have known what it meant at the time. "What?"

Gabe frowned, tossing the plastic bag over to their son before he looked away. "I... asked Rebel to fix it up just in case Luke needed somewhere to go." No one had brought up Luke in years, and for good reason. After Noah's colossal fuck up with 'fixing' the past by helping with their future knowledge... He did eventually find out Luke had lived after Gabe's own trip to the past to intervene. But when they found out the Carnival was hit and Luke Campbell was found among the dead after Rebel disappeared...

Well, it was more of a sore subject than the name Nathan was in their house thereafter.

"Thank you," Noah says instead, opening the bag as he investigated the documentation that from then on would be his new life. After all, it would be ridiculous if he walked around calling the two men dad and pops and father when they would be looking so much younger in their public personas. Something they hadn't been able to do since he was a child.

Peter nudges him later once he and Gabe have sorted out their individual posessons and identities. "The apartment is a little cramped, even if it is bigger than the one in Brooklyn, but it's a hell of a lot better than the truck was."

When they were ready to go, Gabe refilled the hole with a few movements of his hand. The earth didn't even look like it had been disturbed. The metal box was melted down to slag by Noah and Peter, with his old-new messenger bag hanging across his chest, reached for each of their wrists and wrapped his fingers around them with an ease that came from years of practice.

In the blink of an eye, the three men were suddenly assaulted with the noise of a large city since they first left Montreal. Without missing a beat Peter let them go and took off his bag, tossing it into a chair and heading towards what Noah could only assume was the bedroom. "I'm taking a shower. Noah, make yourself comfortable. Gabe, you should probably call the shop and tell'em you're back from that family thing or whatever you told 'em."

Noah looked around the place. It was... messy. Messier than any home he'd ever lived in over his entire life. There were auto parts and comic books scattered around. And not a single analog clock to be found. All digital. All modern. And above the fake fireplace was a piece of paper in a gaudy gold frame. "So you actually did get like, really married. It wasn't just a cover story..."

He can feel Gabe moving around the room behind him, probably cleaning it up a little so he'd have somewhere to sleep. "Not everything about our lives was a lie. We told you the truth."

"I know, but it's... different. Knowing and being told, and then seeing the proof right in front of you... I bet you're both glad to get back after all this time."

"It wasn't so bad," Gabe says and Noah hears the tell-tale sound of fabric being shaken out as he examines a few other knick-knacks on the shelf in front of him. He reaches out to pick one up. A picture of two boys, smiling and laughing and covered in mud and dirt. He expects to see a happy memory when he touches his fingers to it, trying to learn about his parents lives from before they were saddled with him.

Instead he sees a much larger, but more empty place with blue walls and a shouting match between his mother and Peter. The young woman raving about how he had helped cover up what she tried to do for them all. His own hurtful words back about the dangers of what she did and how could she have been so selfish and careless and so very stupid. The very same picture falling from its place and the glass breaking when she leaves and slams the door behind her.

He puts the picture back down like it's burned his hand. It was good to know that despite how things had appeared when he lost his job and he'd ranted and raved about how his mother's actions had caused people like them a lot of problems, his dad actually did agree with him and his complaints. He's pulled from his thoughts when he hears his father chuckle softly. "I'd be careful using that ability in this place, Noah. At least until we've had time to replace half of the furniture." It takes Noah a moment before he realizes why he would say that.

"Oh dear God! Please tell me the kitchen at least is safe!"

"I... would probably make sure you use at least a napkin to put food on instead of the bare counter, even after we scrub the apartment down with bleach."

"What the hell pops!"

Peter reappears in a fresh change of clothes that was a little more form fitting than he was used to seeing his dad in. He's got a towel in hand, rubbing at his still damp hair and the smell of unfamiliar shampoo is wafting through the air, assaulting Noah's heightened senses. "Gabe, are you scaring the kid again?"

"No. Just warning him not to use the psychometry on the apartment unless he wants to go blind."

"What?"

"Not even the kitchen is safe apparently!" Noah barks out from where he's perched on the edge of a chair, looking dubiously towards where he can see the open passage to a fridge.

Peter's cheeks tinge a slight pink. "Like you're so innocent. Lisa Kruger sure had a fun time on our dining table when you were supposed to be studying at the library."

"Shit. How'd you-" Then he looks at Gabe who's shrugging and gone to the bookshelf for something to read. "Of course," he mutters, then shakes his head. "And now I'm going to find a roof to jump off of because that mental image is burned into my mind now."

Peter laughs as Noah snatches some comic books from a pile near where he's sitting and makes for the door.

"You know next time you want to sneak a girl in, you can actually let her stick around for breakfast instead of shoving her out your bedroom window! I don't think Francine O'Connor liked that very much considering we lived on the second floor!"

"Not listening!" Noah shouted back as he left the apartment.

Peter turned to a smug Gabe who had settled into his favorite chair after moving Peter's bag to the floor. "You did not tell him we fucked on the counters. It's so... so unsanitary! We make food there!"

"I never said anything. Just advised that he should probably put a napkin down before setting food on it." Gabe opened his book to a marked page, as if he'd only set it down yesterday instead of twenty years ago. "How was I to know he'd assume we had sex on the counters instead of accepting it as logical and sound advice for everyday life."

Peter sighed and picked up his bag from the floor. "You're such an asshole sometimes."

"And yet you still married me. You could have always backed down..."

"A Petrelli never backs down from a challenge." Despite his harsh tone, the fingers that graze the back of Gabe's neck as Peter passes behind him are firm and affectionate. The emotions that the empath passes to him, knowing the old ability he had picked up from Lydia at the Carnival all those years ago will tell him what his words and voice often could not convey with enough conviction or sincerity, are just as passionate and dark and all consuming as they had been since the first time Peter had felt the Hunger again. "You know... he might be up there a while and it's been so long since we've slept in our own bed..."

The book is forgotten on the coffee table next to a half-rebuilt starter for a minivan seconds before the door to the bedroom is slammed shut behind them.

They are settled back into their lives - and Noah into his new and hopefully now permanent life - when the Petrelli luck finally catches up with them again.

The clock is ticks closer to the endgame. To the deciding moment that will save or doom mankind.

And it happens when Noah is working at his job in an innocent second hand bookstore.

Noah's 20th birthday is a week away.

And he comes across a copy of 9th Wonders... issue number 31. Hungrily he snatches it from the pile of inventory and runs to the back room to read through it. The scene on the cover caught his eye. It's the apartment building where they currently live. Multiple clones of the same man drawn as if charging up to the building. He can see the stylized version of his father, Gabe, standing out on the balcony of their fourth floor Queens apartment, his hand raised in a familiar, threatening pose he'd only seen twice in his life when Gabe had been forced to fight back so Peter could get Noah to safety. The words "Patient Zero Returns!" emblazoned in bold red letters, made to appear oozing with blood in the bottom right corner.

He doesn't think. He grabs his bag and shoves the comic in after seeing the first page - a fight in their apartment with the clones. His heart racing, Noah pulls the strap of his bag over his head to rest it against his neck and chest and teleports away. His emotions are running too high and he overshoots by a block. Not willing to risk another jump and lose all sense of control over his abilities, he runs. He runs hard and he runs as fast as his legs will take him home. Chanting in his head all the while "Please, don't let him die" even though he knows it's impossible for Gabe to be killed. For Peter to be killed. For himself, now, to be killed.

But the young, smiling face of his mother in his memory is a bitter reminder that nothing, even immortality, is truly assured and certain. And so he pleads and he begs and he hopes that what he'll find when he gets home isn't...

He beats Peter by only a few minutes.

The man finds him on the floor, holding a scrap of cloth from his father's favorite black coat. The peacoat he wears even in the middle of a long dry summer. Clutching it like a lifeline and muttering to himself and crying, "He can't die. He can't die. He's... he's-"

Even though the boy is taller than him now, and even though he's so much larger than he used to be, Noah lets himself be pulled into Peter's arms and held like the scared child he truly was, and always had been deep down.

Peter once talked with Gabe about how two futures could exist simultaneously. Schridinger's Future, they had jokingly dubbed his drawings and his mother's dreams. They didn't know, then, that both were depicting the same future, just... out of sync of linear time.

But the theory wasn't too far off in reality and this is something the Graymalkin family would not come to realize for quite a while yet.

The rumours were true. There were indeed two versions of 9th Wonders issue 31. Each one depicting a different series of events centering around the same young man. And depending on which version one specific person in the world first laid eyes and hands on... well, that would be the path the world would take.

Isaac Mendez had always been hesitant about sending out what he knew would be his final comic to the publisher because he couldn't decide which version he had drawn to submit. He didn't know how he knew that it would be his last issue, for at the time he had yet to paint his own death. Hell, half the comics that would be published after his death hadn't even been drawn yet. But his work was sought after, oddly enough, by collectors and so the publisher who, equally oddly enough, had been a branch of The Company, was willing to indulge the drug addict's eccentricity and accept his submissions out of order. As long as they had the correct pages at the correct time, that was all that mattered.

Isaac had held off on submitting the pages for Issue 31, and still hadn't done so upon his death. It was a curious thing when the two sketchbooks with each issue had appeared one day on the desk of the publisher with no note. Just... they had sat there, inexplicably, the very day that the newspaper had announced the murder of the artist.

What was not known to the publisher was that the books were placed there by a Japanese man with a special power who truly adored the comics, and not just because he was on the cover of some of them. At the time Hiro did not have such tight control over his power, but enough to get around and do what his destiny at the time required of him. But when faced with two different versions of the same thing, Hiro Nakamura could not decide which one to take. So, ever the optimist, he took both with the hope that maybe both would get published and he would get double the comic in the days to come.

What Hiro did not realize was that time has a way of correcting itself, in a way, by leaving things to chance. And the publisher, greedy as ever and now faced with the reality that this particular artist would not be making them anymore money, had decided to print and publish both.

And out into the world they went, and the destiny of mankind and the correction of time was left to pure chance.

The future was left unknowable to anyone beyond a single event depicted in both versions of 9th Wonders issue 31, even those with the power to see what was coming.

Until, of course, one young man laid eyes on a cover. And then, only then, would one future become solidified over the other.

But it was not Nathan Bennet under any of his many names that the fate of the world was decided. Oh no. That honor lay with another Bennet entirely.

The day Lyle Bennet picked up a copy of 9th Wonders #31 at his local comic book store, simply to move it out of the way so he could see the latest Green Lantern hiding beneath it on the New Arrivals shelf in Costa Verde, CA in 2007, was the day he had inadvertently doomed his entire species.

For Lyle Bennet had an ability that he would never know. There was a reason he rarely ever got caught acting out and it wasn't because his parents attentions were so heavily focused on his sister Claire and her antics, or his parents' failing marriage. It was because Lyle Bennet could influence chance and probability, and usually in his own favor.

Chance was removed the day Lyle Bennet moved the copy of Issue 31 with his sister's arch nemesis on the cover instead of the one next to it depicting his future nephew, aged 15, and his potential girlfriend.

And that is how Schrodinger's Future had been decided.

But none of that mattered as Gabe fought tooth and nail against the mind fuck he was receiving at the hands of a stronger and much more vindictive Matt Parkman in Sunstone Manor.

None of that mattered as Noah and Peter desperately followed clues in the comic to unravel the deadly plots of Renautus and free Hiro Nakamura from his technological prison. Free him so he could go back. Go back and set their lives and their destinies into motion.

And none of that mattered as Angela Petrelli sent her great-granddaughter on her quest to find her brother and join him at Union Wells High School when the clock ticked over and the end of the world would begin.

He had a choice to make and he didn't like it.

Everything was fucking up left and right and Peter was in over his head.

Noah was trapped and Gabe was unresponsive and Peter stood with blood and brain on his hands and clothes and he hadn't meant to... He hadn't meant to push so hard. He hadn't meant to kill. He just wanted the man to stop. He wanted Gabe's agonizing screams and pleading for death and forgiveness to end.

And Peter couldn't use the man's own power against him. The feedback - it hurt. God it hurt.

But he had to know. He had to see. He had to understand what Parkman was thinking, what had brought him to this place. What had caused him to go so terribly wrong and it was only a little cut. A little incision he hadn't meant to make so deep. But the feel of it, the thrill that slithered up his spine when he saw the first rivulets of crimson and-

"Oh my God!"

He turned, hands up like a surgeon just walking up to the patient and about to operate. But it wasn't gloves coating his hands that had picked through the brain with such careful precision.

And that's when he felt the bullet in his head, right between the eyes.

He might have helped free these people and ultimately saved their lives, but he was a monster. He knew this. And monsters had to be put down.

It's a shame they didn't know where he had moved his kill spot.

They should have aimed for his appendix.

Noah didn't know what was going on. When he came to, he was in a room full of computers and wires and...

"Pops? Is that... is that you?"

Gabe was ripping cables out of the machine. Peter was by the door, keeping a lookout. "We don't have much longer. The backup systems should be coming on line any minute."

Gabe finished releasing their son from the contraption he had been forced, unconscious, into and yanked hard on his arm. "Come on! We don't have much time!"

Noah saw the white watch on his wrist. He looked towards Peter, checking him, too. And there it was. He was dragged, his feet slow responding as he couldn't quite follow what was going on. "We only have one shot at this. We have to get beyond the city's security perimeter before we can teleport," Peter said as he fell into step alongside them, looping an arm into Noah's free one and helping to hurry him along. "Malina's waiting for us but the window is closing every second he's out of that damn chair."

Together the three of them make their way through the Renautus base, having to start hiding and ducking when the alarms went off and signaled Noah's escape. Peter drags him onwards as Gabe covers their retreat before rejoining them.

"This way! Hurry!" Gunfire fills the corridors. Windows are blasted out and there's screams. So many screams.

They run. They fight. Noah makes his first real kill with a chair leg through a man's sternum when his attempt to stop time fails. There's something about this place... Something about this entire building.. the weapons the Renautus guards are using that prevents some powers but not others.

He can blast someone with fire but not freeze a door into place to cover their escape.

Telekinesis is spotty at best. Trying to augment his jumps with flight to clear higher obstacles than he normally could feels like he's wearing lead boots to drag him back down to the Earth.

Noah makes his next kill when Peter is pinned and Gabe's tying to reattach his arm. The woman's head explodes with poorly aimed microwaves. Peter doesn't even blink at the brain matter that clings to his hair as he checks the watch. "We're not going to make it!"

"Yes you will."

"Gabe no!"

He throws down his arm, the limp limb bouncing on the floor, the white watch coated in blood. It won't do him any good now anyway. "I'll clear the way. You get Noah and you make sure he gets where he needs to be. Go!"

Terror rips through the young man's violent determination. "No. I'm not leaving you behind! If it works, you'll-"

"Cease to exist. I know. Maybe it's better that way."

"Like hell it is!" Noah shouts, reaching out for him with his powers - powers he has pushed and shaped and mastered through sheer force of will. And he feels it. He feels that fierce, dark, twisted thing that's been slithering around inside him since he was a boy. Since he first accidentally copied the hungry desire to understand everything, to own everything, to make his mark on the world and didn't even know what it was and it frightened him so badly. He feels it now with such a force that he does not recognize himself anymore. But he refuses to give up the only things that have been his constants in this strange, ever changing life of his. And Gabe is yanked forward against his will as invisible hands threaten to crush his body and he charges onward. Peter taking point if only for the fact that he knows the place better than Noah does. He knows the escape route they plotted out before coming to rescue their son.

It's easy for the guards to follow.

There is nothing but blood and bone and death left in the son of Claire Bennet's wake.

The problem with time travel is the further away from the point you wish to go, chronologically, the more difficult it can be to pinpoint the exact moment in which you mean to arrive. Sometimes you could end up arriving before you've even left. Other times, more than two of you will arrive at the same moment.

Had Noah been raised by Hiro Nakamura and not Peter Petrelli and Gabriel Gray, he might have had a better grasp on the first power he had ever learned to harness.

He also would have likely had some form of meditation training that would allow him to clear his mind prior to attempting a jump of thousands of years.

But with armed forces bearing down on their position and the stress of the situation being rather high and one of their number finally starting to regrow his missing arm once they'd managed to get clear of the city and its power inhibiting defenses, none of them were in the exact correct frame of mind to be attempting such a feat. Let alone with passengers.

And then, Peter had an idea. One that, if they were to be asked a few years later was it a good one or a bad one, he would state that it depended on who you were and what timeline you were currently living in.

Unfortunately, there was so much going on that he hadn't heard the beeping noise on the watch indicating that the narrow window they needed was now well and truly closed. The past was now set and the future carved in stone. There could now be no going back.

"Telepathy. If all three of us focus our power together and make the jump at the same time while keeping contact, I think we'll be able to manage it."

It is at this point that Noah should have remembered this was going to be a bad idea. As the very last page of the very last 9th Wonders had indicated, with a text box to the side of a panel that often times any idea from Peter Petrelli, especially regarding time travel, never quite works out as intended. But he did not remember because he was shaking like a leaf from the adrenaline coursing through him and the dark sense of satisfaction that crawled its way up his spine and burrowed deep into the back of his mind at the carnage and the destruction he and his powers had wrought.

A bloody hand slaps him hard across the face. He turns his angry eyes to the one who dared such an offensive act on one that should be treated as a damn God among ants and-

"Noah, reign it in. Now is NOT the time!" Gabe snarls at him after the second and last time he will ever hit his son as Peter continues to explain his plan.

Noah has to focus on his sister. Just on his sister. Gabe would focus on a time and date and Peter would handle the location. Peter would use the telepathy he stole from Matt to link the three of them together now that he truly understood how it worked. All of them working at the same moment would put as much power as possible behind what they needed to do.

In theory, it SHOULD have worked.

And when their bolthole was finally invaded by armed guards, they weren't quite fast enough.

Landing on the other side, they didn't really think about the world not dying around them.

Instead, two men scrambled to catch the boy with the bullet in the back of his brain, eyes rolled up into the back of his head and his body limp and growing cold.

"Noah!" Peter shouted as Gabe grabbed him and pulled him tight as tight as he could with his one good arm.

What a sight they might have made if anyone had seen them.

The Italian Eagle Scout who could do no wrong now covered in blood and gore that he wasn't entirely innocent of, and the hardened serial killer softened by years and years of forced exile with a child that was his in all but blood.

"We can't stay here."

"Noah... Noah can- He can heal. It's the first power he's ever had. He can, we just have to-"

"We can't stay here. We have to go, Gabe."

"The bullet. We've got to, if I can just-"

Peter slaps him as hard as he can. The boy's body is dropped and the one-armed killer snarls and snaps before wrapping the boy - because he would ALWAYS be Gabe's little boy - in the careful cradle of telekinesis and grabs Peter by the arm. "Fine," he growls, and they are gone.

When the janitors come at the start of the school term after the summer, they won't know how the rust colored stain ended up on the floor of the utility closet on the second floor in the Computer wing of Union Wells High School. But it sure was a bitch to clean up.

They find an abandoned trailer in the desert near where one of their old safe houses used to be. It's run down and filled with sand, dust, and Gabe believes he can taste cocaine in the air. It doesn't matter. The drugs won't affect them for more than a few minutes at a time anyway.

Noah is placed on the only piece of furniture that seems to still be structurally sound - a coffee table - and Peter gets to work. He's careful - as careful as he can be without the proper tools to work - and he uses his fingers and telekinesis as precisely as he can in removing the bullet. Then the shrapnel. It's messy, and a small chunk of brain comes out with it. He doesn't tell Gabe that, and instead bins is. He can't put it back even if he'd wanted to.

Gabe never leaves his side after Peter is done and walks away.

"I... The world feels wrong. Maybe we overshot it. We came back too soon."

The most recent thing in the trailer is a Woman's Day magazine from October 2009. Peter's excuse is that he's going to look for news. Grab a paper or a radio or something and bring it back. And yeah, he'll be careful. He'll wear one of the many different faces they used to have. He'll get them some clothes, too while he's out.

Peter doesn't come back for two weeks.

Noah still hasn't moved.

Gabe hasn't slept a wink.

"Maybe... Maybe you screwed up," Gabe says finally after Peter's brought in the last of the supplies he's fathered. "Maybe there's still some shrapnel left and I just need to... to cut, just a little and...."

There are no words Peter can say that will ever make this okay. Nothing will ever make it alright. And he knows he will blame himself for the rest of time for not being able to save their son. And he knows more than anything else and with exact certainty that his husband will blame him, too. Maybe that's why he started the fight. Sure, he said it was to keep Gabe from cracking open Noah's skull and digging through his head as if it were a simple melon. He claimed he was trying to make sure their son wasn't "another of Sylar's victims". But deep down Peter knew that wasn't it. Their son was dead and he just wanted to fucking feel something about it. He wanted someone to make him pay for his failure.

And oh, Gabe did.

It was... strange.

He was free, for a time at least, of the darkness and the pain and the heavy weight of his destiny.

Then again he had no idea where the hell he even was.

But there was a lot of light. And it was noisy, like New York was noisy.

He found himself on a rooftop. There were pigeons and a coop. A greenhouse nearby that looked like it hadn't been tended in ten years or more.

"I've never seen you around here before," croaked a voice. "Why don't you come a little closer and let me get a good look at you."

Noah turned towards the voice and it was an old black man. He was seated in a chair at a metal table with a mesh pattern on top. The discoloration told him it had been there for some years. He hears voices nearby and recognizes one of them. He turns his head quickly to see one of his dads, but younger. He's smiling awkwardly at a black woman a little distance away.

"They can't hear us. This is just a dream."

"He looks so... I've never seen him so young and carefree." And it's the truth. By the time he came into Peter and Gabe's lives the innocence, the idealism was already gone. Replaced by life experiences and cynicism. And he knows that over the last twenty years it's only gotten worse. He hasn't made it any easier for the nurse just a few meters away. "I wish I'd known him like that."

"It won't last. Nothing ever does."

"Am I dead?"

"Perhaps," the man says to him. "Come over here. Sit down for a while."

"I can't. I have to get back. The world... The H.E.L.E... My sister she's not strong enough without me to help. She'll never be able to turn back the flares on her own."

"Time has no meaning here young man. In fact, I think from where you're standing I've been dead a very long time."

"then how are we here?"

"Dreams are odd things. They never happen in the order you expect them to. I told one of my oldest friends this a long time ago, but she never listened. And I doubt she ever will, even after I'm gone."

"I don't understand," Noah says, but joins the man at the table anyway. "Why don't I understand?"

"Because you are in my dream, not your own. And here you have no power. No abilities. Here, you are as normal as anyone else."

"It feels... nice. But... How did I get here? And where even is here? I recognize New York but I don't think I spent much time in this part of the city."

The old man chuckles. "How you got here, I don't know. But I find people often come to me when they are weighed down by a burden they don't believe they can carry."

"Is this your power? Can you pull people into your dreams?"

"Something like that. You're a quick one, I'll give you that."

Noah smiles and glances back to where he last saw Peter. Now, there's just empty space with a cracked door to the greenhouse. "Dear god don't tell me he's... and he just left you out here! I mean I know him and Gabe are worse than rabbits in heat but-"

"No. They'll kiss. She'll feel guilty and push him away because I'm sitting out here while they are in there. Then she'll get a call about her boyfriend and leave."

"And my presence here won't even be noticed?"

"No. This one is one of my favorites. I find using real memories for the setting of these kinds of dreams is more appealing than wading through a pudding marsh or running through a forest with a gingerbread bat flying after us."

Noah smiled and he knows the old man is just trying to put him at ease. Make him feel more comfortable so he'll talk. "What's your name?"

"Nathan but... my dads renamed me Noah. They said if I had to be named after my grandfather, they would rather me be named after the one they both liked."

A door opens quickly and they hear the woman's heels clacking towards them. The old man smiles and nods as she comes to him. "I'm sorry I have to cut this visit short. One of my clients wants me to come look at a new piece and with how temperamental he can be-"

"It's alright. I'm not going to die on you yet."

"Dad don't talk like that!"

"Just leave me in the hands of Saint Peter and I'll be just fine."

Noah nearly chokes on air and the old man's eyes show his amusement. The woman leans down and kisses his temple. "I'll be back again tomorrow."

Noah watches her go, then watches Peter emerge from the greenhouse, smoothing out his top and running his hand through his hair with a nervous smile as he approaches the old man. "Ready to go back in Mr. Deveux?"

"I think I'll sit here a while longer, Peter, and enjoy the fresh air."

Noah watches the young man with an intense fascination and a faint smile on his face. He is still in awe of how young Peter looks and how happy and hopeful he is like this. Before the powers. Before the battles and the betrayals and... and Sylar. "I was shot. I think." He reaches up to touch the back of his head. His fingers find a damp hole in his hair. He pulls it away and finds blood, but he feels no pain and otherwise feels.... fine really. "We were... we had to teleport. Peter had this idea-"

"Peter's ideas never have worked out well have they?"

Noah nods, but never looks away from his bloody hand, uncaring of the young man not much older than himself puttering about nearby, tending to other assorted tasks he must have while caring for the old man seated in the wheelchair beside him. "There's always a kink in the plan somewhere... but things usually work out alright."

"But not this time it seems."

"Yeah... and I died for it."

"Did you now?"

"I'm pretty sure I've died now and this is hell. Stuck with an old man and forced to watch a past I can never interact with. Forced to see people I love and care about happier than I've ever seen them in my entire life. Forced to live with the knowledge that I know what's going to happen and how things work out and unable to change a damn thing!" He slams his fist against the table before getting up from his chair and pacing like a caged animal. "I shouldn't be here in your stupid dream. I should be out there! Alive and breathing and fighting! The world is ending and I'm sitting here having a goddamn tea party with some dead old guy and a dream version of my dad!"

The old man watched him and listened to him rant a while before nodding sagely. "You've been fighting a long time already Noah. Don't you deserve to rest, at least for a while?"

The young man is silent. "Yes," he finally says, then adds, "But I have so much I still have to do. If I don't wake up... I have worked all my life to prepare for one single moment in time. I'm... I'm the hero. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. Or the one."

"Star Trek. The Wrath of Khan I believe," the old man says, smiling.

"Why am I here?"

"The same reason your father will have come to see me again one more time," he replies. "You needed to hear the truth." The dream Peter steps up behind the old man's wheelchair and bends down to take off the breaks. He brushes the hair out of his face and smiled kindly.

"It's time to head back in now, Mr. Deveaux. You need your medication and if you don't get it on time, your doctor is going to kill me."

"You're too good for me, Peter."

"You say that now," the dream Peter said jokingly. "But just you wait until it's time for your shot. You'll be singing a different tune then."

Noah sighs in frustration. "What truth? What is it I need to hear?!"

"No one man can know the whole of his destiny and sometimes even God has the most spectacular failures. But out of those failures something even greater rises. Good luck, Noah. I think your fathers must be quite worried about you by now."

They froze in mid strike, Peter pinned to the sand with Gabe about to strike a truly gruesome killing blow to the head when they hear him. Feet shuffling awkwardly through the sand before he falls to his knees just outside the rundown trailer. Old blood dried and flaking from his limbs and stiff clothes.

"I die," he manages to gasp out around the lump in his throat. "For half an hour!" The poor bastard has no sense of time. "And you're already!-" Noah coughs. He hacks and he gags and he shakes with the effort of getting whatever it is out of his lungs and up his throat. He wants to swallow so badly, but he doesn't. He wills himself to keep pushing and keep forcing whatever it is up and out. He curls inward, one arm cradled against his stomach and the other holding him up to keep from face planting into the dirt. Finally, he opens his mouth and a large blob of phlegm with rocks and dirt and bone chips and metal scrapings is expelled followed by a short spray of blood.

He's gasping now like he hasn't breathed for a week - and he hasn't. He's been dead on a coffee table. The itchy feeling in the back of his head reminds him he was shot. He's a bit woozy and his motor functions aren't exactly doing as he is trying to tell them at the moment. Noah doesn't know about the bit of brain that Peter had pulled out with shrapnel and the bullet. And neither does Gabe for that matter.

"Trying to kill each other!" he finally manages to finish getting out before passing out into the dirt.

Noah slept like a log for a few days straight.

Peter sat on one side while Gabe sat on the other, making sure he kept breathing.

Neither apologized to the other. They didn't need to when even as he'd been pounding Peter's face into the desert floor he could feel the man's self loathing and guilt with each solid strike of skin to skin. And Peter had felt the rage and the fire with each blow and knew it to be fueled by grief and not hate as it had been in the past.

Instead, Peter said quietly into the silence, "I think you lost your wedding ring."

Gabe flexed his newly regrown hand. "We were due a new set anyway," he replied. "Isn't that what normal people do after a couple of decades of marriage?"

Once Noah was awake and the two men had assured themselves he was alive and whole (Peter was forced to come clean about the chunk of brain that, after talking with Noah some, he believed it was a portion of his motor control that he'd ripped out of his head by accident), they started trying to figure out where and when they were.

After one of Peter's foraging trips had unearthed a mess of old car batteries (which the three took turns recharging with the blue lightning and NOT the red since that made the damn things explode), they were able to get at least some rudimentary electricity to the old trailer by building a makeshift generator. As long as they rationed the use of electricity they didn't have to recharge the batteries too often.

Gabe would leave for whole days at a time and return with stacks of newspapers, tabloids, and magazines.

There was a wind-up radio left on the coffee table that had been fiddled and tinkered with until Noah had managed to rig the crank into a rudimentary perpetual motion machine. It wasn't pretty, but it worked well enough to let music and news play in the background.

Gabe tended to keep it on NPR whereas Peter liked to dial through the stations one at a time before settling, without fail, on some catchy pop tune. They both knew he did it just to be aggravating.

Life, it seemed, beyond the H.E.L.E. was not what he had expected it to be. And each day spent in this new, strange world, was one more day further from where he once believed his destiny lay. He had failed. Even with mastery over every power he had collected from both of his parents, and the contributions of Hiro Nakamura and his mother Claire Bennet... He was a god among men and yet he had to be reminded that even God fails sometimes.

Noah sat on a milk crate, listening to the radio as he patched a pair of old jeans he'd found buried in the trash of the trailer. Well... maybe he could make something of it in this new world. Make something better, something spectacular, rise from the ashes of his life's greatest mistake.

The front door creaks as it opens, and Peter lets himself in. He's got a cardboard box under one arm and a jug of water under the other. "Well?" Gabe asks as he comes out of the mostly broken kitchen.

"Well... I'm a terrorist and you're still a wanted man," Peter says. "But I was able to get what we needed to make new identities. Feel like being Ian and Elias again? It's been a while since we were them."

Noah shakes his head as the two men hash out their cover and trying to pick where they should live next. Maybe... maybe they'll be alright. He doubts they'll find their way home. And he knows that Peter will never give up trying to get them home. Home to stop the H.E.L.E. Home to save their friends and family.

But for the first time in his life, Noah's... happy. He's freer than he has ever been. He doesn't know what his destiny is or what the future holds for him. And yes it's selfish, beyond selfish even, but he doesn't want to go back. He doesn't want to have the fate of all mankind resting on his shoulders. And yes his sister's dead. And his great-grandmother. And whomever his real father is. And his best friend from when he was 8. And the lovely house they had lived in that looked like an expensive log cabin has been blown to smithereens. Their house from Carbondale vaporized and Renautus is in charge of any survivors thousands of years from now. But Noah finds with each passing day... while he does care and he does feel the loss... Objectively none of it matters. He is alive and they are not. He is here and they are not.

It's as Peter and Gabe start arguing over some insignificant detail in planning out their new lives that Noah finishes repairing the jeans and leaves to go change into them so he can make sure he did it right. At least, that was his intention.

Instead, he stops in the doorway to the bathroom, the jeans slung over one of his bare shoulders, and stares at the familiar face in front of him. Just before the woman pukes on his shoes. Across her forehead is a line of dried blood, and her brown hair is matted with it, but there is no visible scarring on her youthful features. She falls forward, mumbling "sorry" as he catches her in his arms. "Claire?" he exclaims frantically, looking back towards his fathers in confusion and disbelief.  


**Author's Note:**

> The Noah Timeline has events spread out and spaced a bit from 2006 in season 1 to 2010 in season 4, as explained below:
> 
> The events of season 1 and 2 happen just as they do in canon.  
The Timeline Split - The "Noah" Timeline branches from the prime timeline (the shows) in 2007 after the Bennets have moved to Costa Verde and become "The Butlers".
> 
> As a result, there is a lull in action and things do not pick up in season 3 until 2008. The Pinehurst situation takes place during 2008-2009, leaving Building 26 and those events taking place in 2009-2010. Season 4 takes place in Mid to late 2010, ending on December 7, 2010 with Claire’s jump from the Ferris wheel at the carnival in Central Park.
> 
> Claire was a junior in high school in 2006/2007 school year. She would have been a senior during the 2007/2008 year, but dropped out to get her GED. She took a gap year for 2008/2009 and was made to start looking at colleges by Angela Petrelli in 2009/2010, ultimately ending up at Arlington for the fall 2010 term.
> 
> In the Prime/Canon timeline, according to the Heroes Wiki, seasons 1-3 all happen in 2006-2007 with season 4 being a bit of a gray area because of when Sylar has Thanksgiving with Peter an Angela as well as Claire's jump being canonically given as happening on Dec 7, 2010. So for my use here, I'm assuming in the Prime/Canon timeline things happened at a faster pace and Thanksgiving happened in 2007 or 2008 with Claire's jump happening that following December.


End file.
